Tag Archives: Legal Ethics

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Privilege and Precedent: It is far from clear that Mueller can compel Trump to testify before his grand jury.

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The Weekly Standard

Special counsel Robert Mueller wants to talk to the president. With the pitched battle of words forever escalating—Trump’s new team of gloves-off lawyers and his vocal supporters pitted against the special counsel’s own proponents in the media—many exude confidence in Mueller’s power to subpoena the president’s testimony, assuming the eventual backing of the Supreme Court. But let’s slow down a bit. Although Mueller has warned Trump’s lawyers that he might subpoena the president if he refuses to testify voluntarily, he might well elect not to. The two sides could compromise on a deal for testimony on limited subjects or only […]

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Discredited Sex Assault Research Infects U.S. Legal System

by Linda LeFauve & Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Real Clear Politics

When a toxin enters a biological ecosystem, its effect is magnified as it moves up the food chain. Even if it can be cut off at the source, the ever-widening distribution of its increasingly harmful form can cause problems for decades. Misinformation functions in a similar fashion, gaining traction as it’s repeated by increasingly high-profile individuals who venture ever further from the source material. In this manner, distortion about the facts of sexual assault has affected the training of judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials. It is how misleading assertions become embedded in criminal and military law. This is […]

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End the Bias in Campus Sexual-Misconduct Tribunals

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. are coauthors of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities (Encounter Books, 2017).

Real Clear Politics

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her advisers have made a remarkably good start at ending the Obama administration’s abuse of federal regulatory power to attack the due-process rights of university students accused of sexual assault. But the more important task—the crafting of Title IX regulations to ensure fair treatment for both parties in campus cases—is ahead. Last September, DeVos publicly called for fairness to both sides in campus adjudications. About two weeks later, the Education Department withdrew the Title IX “guidance” that the Obama administration had imposed to specify guilt-presuming procedures for the nation’s colleges and universities to use. DeVos has also ended […]

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You’re Fired!

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The Weekly Standard

As special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI circle ever closer to the Oval Office, Washington is convulsed by speculation that the president may take drastic action to cut short the investigation. Donald Trump has escalated his Twitter attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department, and there is a growing effort among Trump supporters to paint the investigation as hopelessly compromised. The December 1 guilty plea of former national security adviser Michael Flynn will have only intensified Trump’s fears that the special counsel is focused on his family. Trump’s lawyers continue to claim that the president has nothing to […]

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The Title IX Training Travesty

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr.

The Weekly Standard

In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault. Both parties in the case had credibility issues; he had violated a no-contact order, she had withheld from the university the bulk of their text messages. But the accused student possessed strong exculpatory evidence. He produced the full record of their communications, which included texts from the accuser to him discussing the encounter in a highly positive fashion and referencing a “plan” to […]

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What Betsy DeVos Gets Right About Campus Sexual Assault

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Time

On Sept. 7, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took on one of former President Barack Obama’s most controversial regulatory actions: a set of 2011 campus disciplinary procedures for students accused of sexual assault. Arguing that victims of assault were being denied justice, the Obama White House weakened traditional protections for the accused, like presumption of innocence and the right to cross-examine an accuser. DeVos, in a speech at George Mason University, said the system “is shameful, it is wholly un-American, and it is anathema to the system of self-governance to which our Founders pledged their lives over 240 years ago.” Not surprisingly, DeVos was […]

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A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’

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National Review

A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest.

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Target of Wis. investigation accuses DA of criminal abuses of power

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Legal Newsline

MILWAUKEE (Legal Newsline) – Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm faces a deadline of Oct. 12 to decide whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his own conduct. Whatever Chisholm decides will complicate the re-election bid of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who is locked in a tenacious battle with Democrat Mary Burke. The carefully written, eight-page petition for a special prosecutor was filed by Eric O’Keefe, a free market activist at the center of Chisholm’s criminal probe of Walker and 29 allied conservative groups. O’Keefe filed his petition on Sept. 26 and made it public on Monday. It alleges […]

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Scott Walker-prosecutor dodges new questions about ethics; Special prosecutor requested

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Legal Newsline

MILWAUKEE (Legal Newsline) – Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat, has criminally investigated Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker and his political allies since 2012. The so-called “John Doe investigation” – coming on the heels of an earlier, similarly sweeping, two-year investigation of Walker and his staff – has been accompanied by highly unusual court-approved “gag orders,” barring the leaders of 29 conservative groups and other Walker associates from speaking out. One of those activists, Eric O’Keefe, and the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which he runs, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit saying that the entire investigation is a political […]