More on Widener Law School Controversy

At Legal Insurrection, "Widener Law School loses major donor over Connell case."



This case is far from played out. Nice blogging by William Jacobson.

'ScamProf' Law Professor Paul Campos Interviewed at Wall Street Journal

Ann Althouse pretty much nailed it the other day, in an update to her post on epic law prof loser and Lawyers, Gun and Money blogger Paul Campos:

I'd say Paul Campos is doing just fine. He should keep up the graphomania, hook Oxford University Press again, and grasp the fame and money that comes from writing a pithy polemic that hits right in the zone as people question the value of a legal education.

Yep, see WSJ, "A Q&A With the Creator of ‘Inside the Law School Scam’."



I have a neat little related story on this, but that'll have to wait for another post.

BWAHAHA!! Paul Campos, Law Professor and Asshat Blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Outed as 'ScamProf'

At left, freakin' asshat Law Professor and LGM blogger Paul Campos, a.k.a ScamProf.



******



See The Tax Prof, "Anonymous Law Prof Behind Law School Scam Blog Outs Himself: Paul Campos."



And here's this, from Brian Lieter, "Update on ScamProf":

ScamProf is the failed academic who has done almost no scholarly work in the last decade, teaches the same courses and seminars year in and year out, and spends his time trying to attract public attention, sometimes under his own name, this time anonymously. These are important facts about ScamProf, since he is indeed scamming his students and his state, and his initial posts were tantamount to a confession that he's not doing his job. His colleagues, in any case, now know who he is, and are quite understandably angry, since the reckless generalizations are naturally read as commentary on them. After we called him out Monday, ScamProf pulled back a bit, and switched gears and stopped projecting his own failures on to all his professional colleagues and started actually writing about the economics of legal education...

OMG, that is harsh! Couldn't have happened to more dickish guy. Shoot, those assholes at Lawyers, Guns and Money are busting the balls off the epic dick-meter scale! Keep it up guys! And stay classy, ROTFLMFAO!!



The Tax Prof has a little roundup, and check the comments at Althouse, "'Anonymous Law Prof Behind Law School Scam Blog Outs Himself: Paul Campos'."

Jennifer Perez and Nadege Tandoh

Those are the names of the two Widener University law students who made egregious allegations against Professor Lawrence Connell. They are identified at the Delaware Law Weekly, "Controversy Continues at Widener After Connell Suspension" (via William Jacobson).



Also at Newsworks, "Delaware law professor sues two students and Widener Law."



PREVIOUSLY: "The Claims of Grievance-Bearing Identity Groups Will Always Prevail Over Fairness," and "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'."

Professor Lawrence Connell's Hypotheticals

ICYMI, be sure to read my earlier entry, "Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School."



I've been thinking about the case and will have more later. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out Deans Ammons' animosity toward Professor Connell. Charlotte Allen notes:

Connell’s most egregious offense ... and probably the offense that brought down the full-bore wrath of Ammons upon him, was a series of classroom hypotheticals. The scenarios involved Ammons herself and Connell’s efforts to kill her (hypothetically) after she threatened to fire him (hypothetically) for parking his car in her parking space. In one of the hypotheticals Connell rushed into Ammons’ office with his .357 magnum and shot her in the head—except that the “head” turned out to a pumpkin artfully painted to look just like the dean. The idea was to ask the class whether under prevailing legal rules he should be tried for attempted murder—or not, since no harm actually befell her. Imaginative and macabrely humorous hypotheticals, often pitting professors against deans and other campus authority figures, are a standard feature of Old Law School pedagogy. The idea is that the students will absorb and remember the underlying legal principles better in a context of humorous narrative. Hypotheticals show up not just in law school classrooms but in exam questions and moot-court competitions. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was repeatedly murdered in classroom hypotheticals when she was dean of Harvard Law School.

Indeed, as Professor Jonathan Turley indicates, "Widener Law Professor Suspended For Using Dean In Hypotheticals":

I must confess that I routinely incorporate the Dean at our school in the same type of hypotheticals as well as any contract professors. Indeed, my final every year involves some struggle between myself and the Dean and contracts professors. Absent something more, I fail to see the basis for such disciplinary action. Other professors have raises objections to the case on sites like Volokh.



In his letter, [Widener Vice Dean J. Patrick] Kelly accuses Connell of an “outgoing pattern” of misconduct, and cites his use of such hypotheticals, including “cursing and coarse behavior, “racist and sexist statements” and “violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten your colleagues.” Without more, the allegations raise serious concerns over academic freedom and privilege.



I am most disturbed by the statement of Gregory F. Scholtz, associate secretary and director of the American Association of University Professors. AAUP is organization that is expected to defend academic freedom. Yet, Scholtz is quoted as saying “Education is all about pushing the boundaries, and it’s all about controversial ideas, but the question always is when does it cross the line. Given our modern culture and the violence that exists, you’re really asking for trouble when you talk about killing people.” Really? That is news to those of us who teach torts and criminal law. It is common for faculty to incorporate colleagues into hypotheticals as good-humored jokes. At my school, contracts professors respond by incorporating me into their own hypotheticals. I have never found it even remotely bothersome or insulting. It keeps the attention of students and adds a needed element of levity in lectures.

It's routine. And Turley has more on how chilling the Lawrence case is for academic freedom.



Also, at Volokh, "Interview With Lawrence Connell, the Criminal Law Professor Suspended for His Hypotheticals":

Q: Can you give me an example of a hypothetical you might have used in class, to which the students who complained might have been referring? Can you describe the context in which you would have used it?



A: Yes, here is one: The Dean has threatened to fire me if she comes to school one more time and finds that I have parked in her designated parking space. Upset about the possibility of losing both my job and the parking space, I bring my .357 to school, get out of my car, put the .357 into my waistband, walk to the top floor where her office is located, open the door to her office, see her seated at her desk, draw my weapon, aim my weapon, and fire my weapon directly into what I believe to be her head. To my surprise, it’s not the Dean at all, but an ingeniously painted pumpkin — a pumpkin that has been intricately painted to look like the Dean. Dick Tracy rushes in and immediately wrestles me to the ground. I am charged with the attempted murder of the Dean.



The hypothetical raises various issues about attempted crimes that might entail discussion that spans more than one class. Some of the classroom discussion in the first, for example, will address the two basic philosophical problems of why we punish attempts, which are failed efforts at crime, and why we punish attempts less than successfully completed crimes.



A retributive argument, on the one hand, is that the attemptor has demonstrated his moral culpability by his bad conduct, and the degree of his punishment should not depend on a fortuitous turn of luck. On the other hand, a retributivist might argue that punishment in the absence of harm is unjust. For retributive purposes, has Connell demonstrated his moral culpability by shooting what he believes to be the Dean? Or does the fact that he merely destroyed a pumpkin suggest that his punishment would be unjust?

It's obviously a powerful heuristic.



More on this tonight. I'm checking around for more on Deans Ammons' motivations to persecute Professor Connell.

Charlotte Allen: 'The Mess at Widener Law School'

At Minding the Campus (via Glenn Reynolds):

Old Law School culture revolves around a traditional curriculum—those torts and contracts courses—and the Socratic method of instruction, with its pointed and rigorous give-and-take between professors and students. Old Law School assumes that the process of training lawyers is training them to a centuries-old Anglo-American tradition of lawyerly thought, which rests on the careful crafting of legal arguments and the relentless challenging of those arguments, often by the professor in the classroom. Old precedent-setting cases may be supplanted by newer cases, and legal principles may shift, but the underlying methodology of close analysis of written court opinions and the arguments on which they rest, along with certain assumptions underlying the American legal systems—that human beings are generally capable of exercising reason and free will and thus should be held responsible for their actions—are Old Law School constants.



New Law School culture, growing out of the Critical Legal Studies movement that first surfaced in law schools during the 1980s, is quite different. In New Law School thinking, the law does not embody a rational system of justice—or even strivings toward such a system—but is essentially a political construct that has historically operated to keep the rich and powerful in their places of wealth and power and other groups—women, racial minorities, the disabled, and the poor—in their socially subordinate places. If this characterization sounds Marxist, that is because Critical Legal Studies—and its intellectual progeny, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory—grew out of the New Left radicalism of the 1960s, which viewed American governmental and social structures as systems of oppression. It has also been influenced by postmodernist literary theory, with its assumptions that there is no objective truth or reality. In New Law School thinking, reason, free will, and personal responsibility are illusions, for all legal battles are actually struggles of race, class, and gender, in which power, not justice, is the ultimate goal. In New Law School scholarly writing, rigorous analysis of court opinions and the drawing of fine distinctions underlying legal arguments have been supplanted by “story telling": personal narratives typically involving the law professors’ own experiences as members of an oppressed group with the race-gender-class matrix that is the source of their oppression. Since a shift in the power structure, not justice, is the goal, any tactic that coerces the recalcitrant into conforming to the new power regime is permissible in New Law School thinking.

Continue reading. Especially good is Allen's discussion of Linda Ammons. I wrote briefly along the same lines here, "Widener's Dean Linda Ammons Goes After Law School Professor Lawrence Connell."



And from Allen's conclusion, she notes that Professor Lawrence Connell was exonerated of the allegations against him, yet Ammons still prevailed on her preposterous charge that Connell "retaliated":

What is appalling is that, despite both exonerations, Ammons appears to have gotten her way in the end after all, exacting sanctions against a tenured professor that are not only costly but humiliating (he is supposed to apologize to the complaining students. The charge of retaliation, based on a vague prohibition in the faculty handbook, seem especially flimsy. Connell’s e-mail to his students in December neither named his accusers nor referred to them in any way. As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.