Environmental Bounty Hunters, on Trail of Cash, Are in California Official's Sights– by Adam Liptak at The New York Times

Excerpted from the full article at the New York Times:
In the traditions of the Old West, California deputizes bounty hunters to help enforce its environmental laws.

But these deputies, who get to keep a quarter of any penalties they recover for the state, carry briefcases rather than pistols, and their critics say their tactics amount to legalized extortion. All it takes to win a settlement from a private company is a little research — to identify even a trace amount of a toxin in, say, office supplies or a parking lot — and some threatening legal boilerplate. Extracting settlements in these cases, an appeals court judge wrote last year, is “absurdly easy.” Jerry Brown, the state’s former governor and now its attorney general, intends to bring some order to the situation. He started by picking a fight last month with the state’s leading bounty hunter, Clifford A. Chanler.

“He takes advantage of small companies,” Edward G. Weil, a lawyer in Mr. Brown’s office, said of Mr. Chanler. “He pummels small, basically defenseless companies for small amounts of money individually for cases that should not have been brought in the first place.”

In the past seven years, Mr. Chanler has sent over 600 notices and filed more than 200 lawsuits on behalf of a few clients, none of whom even claimed to have been injured, and collected $15 million in settlements in return.

Over coffee the other day, Mr. Chanler said he did not much care for the term bounty hunter. link to source.