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Stuart Taylor, Jr.

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Real Sexual Harassment

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Remember Graydon Snyder, the professor at Chicago Theological Seminary who got a sexual harassment reprimand for exploring the role of intent in sin by reciting a story from the Talmud about a man who falls off a roof, lands on a woman, and accidentally has intercourse with her?

Remember J. Donald Silva, the writing instructor at the University of New Hampshire who got a sexual harassment suspension for classroom use of sexual metaphors-like a famous belly dancer’s comparison of her craft to "Jell-O on a plate, with a vibrator under the plate"-that some female students found offensive? (Silva later won a judicial ruling that the suspension violated the First Amendment.)

Remember the student at Tufts University who was temporarily suspended for selling T-shirts inscribed with 15 reasons "Why Beer is Better than Women at Tufts"?

Such examples create a temptation in some quarters to dismiss reflexively claims of sexual harassment, and sex discrimination generally, as ideologically tinged whining over trifles by politically correct women whose actual agenda is censorship.

But now comes a timely reminder-from Normal, Ill.-of the real sexual harassment that stalks many women, especially blue-collar women breaking into traditionally male workplaces, who are often subjected to crude sexist vilification of a sort rarely experienced by pampered propagandists of PC paranoia who populate the professoriate.

Normal is home to the now infamous factory owned by Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America Inc. The company was hit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on April 9 with the largest sexual harassment suit in history, alleging rampant harassment of as many as 500 women at the plant since it opened in 1988.

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Victim Of A Ten-Year Vendetta

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The American Lawyer

THE FUTURE LOOKED bright for Kenneth Treadwell as the Florida spring of 1986 melted toward summer.

So it came as "a major shock," he recalls, when he was slapped in the face with an ice-cold Miranda warning, as he walked into an interview with assistant U.S. attorney Lothar Genge and four other investigators.

Not that Treadwell hadn’t known this was serious business: Sunrise Savings and Loan Association-the client he had joined in 1984, leaving the West Palm Beach branch of Blank, Rome, Comisky & McCauley-had failed spectacularly, and been taken over by federal regulators in July 1985. The former top management was under investigation by a federal grand jury.

But Treadwell, who had been outside counsel during the critical events being probed, had been granted immunity and treated cordially by federal prosecutors during two prior interviews. He had consistently denied wrongdoing and saw himself as one of the good guys, cooperating with the investigation. Indeed, he had been kept on at Sunrise by the new, government-installed management to help with the salvage operation, winning high commendations. He was happily married, with three young children under 6 years old, and was a respected leader in his church and community.

All that seemed suddenly at risk on May 28, 1986, as the implications of that Miranda warning sunk in, and the interview proceeded. Genge bored in on some suspect transactions in mid-1984, when Treadwell was still a junior partner at Blank, Rome, helping Sunrise work out problem loans. For the first time, Treadwell recalls, the investigators evinced suspicions that he and more senior partners of the 190-lawyer, Philadelphia-based firm-right up to Marvin Comisky, the most senior partner of all-had facilitated fraud at Sunrise, the firm’s biggest client.

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The Debate: Judge Bashing Redux

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

We have collected all the presidential candidates’ statements about America’s recently discovered judge crisis, and fed them into a computer. The machine has peered six months into the future and projected some of the questions and answers in the Big Debate.

Q: I’d like to ask how each of you would change the federal judiciary. And Senator Dole, please explain whether you are here tonight as the Bob Dole who voted to confirm 98 percent of President Clinton’s judges, or the one who blames them for the crime problem and "the crisis in our courts."

Sen. Bob Dole: Bob Dole is here as the Bob Dole who lets Bob Dole be Bob Dole. And when Bob Dole is president, there will be no more liberal judges. No more moderates, either. Only Bob Dole judges-you know, here a Dole, there a Dole, everywhere a Dole Dole. No cowardly, craven, crime-coddling judges. No Democrat judges.

Bob Dole’s judges will be so tough,we won’t be able to build gas chambers and electric chairs and gallows and firing squads and lethal-injection get-ups fast enough. We’ll have to bring in Dr. Kevorkian to move things along.Bob Dole’s judges will pack guns under their robes and wear NRA membership cards like badges of honor.

President Bill Clinton: Me, too. Toughness and diversity, that’s what we want. But my judges will be tougher, and more vigorous and youthful too, and more supportive of Medicare and the minimum wage. And the problem is the Republicans not supporting these things, or our police, and not putting more cops on the beat-cops who can kill the criminals before they ever get to court, and I love it when they do that, I just want to hug them all.

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NewsHour: Double Jeopardy in the War on Drugs – April 17, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Now for more on today’s oral arguments, we turn to NewsHour regular Stuart Taylor of the "American Lawyer" magazine. Stuart, thank you for joining us. We’ve just seen the details of the California case, but there were two cases, the other from Michigan. Briefly explain that one.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Yes. The Michigan case is a little bit more sympathetic for the defendant than this case in California, because the defendant in Michigan, for one thing, is not a drug dealer. He grew some marijuana near his home, and he cured it in his home, and he, his wife, and his grown son smoked it until the son broke up with his fiancee, who turned them all in, and they were arrested, or he was arrested, and first, his property, the government tried to forfeit his home and his ten acres, and then they prosecuted, convicted him, and wanted to send him to prison for five years. And he’s in the Supreme Court saying, they can’t do both of these things to me.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Are the cases together? I mean, they’re joined?

STUART TAYLOR: The cases have been consolidated because they have a lot more in common than they have indifferent, but it would be possible for, for one of them to win and the other to lose, not likely but possible.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And basically just to reiterate that the case is simply–can you say the case is simply–

STUART TAYLOR: Simply about–

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: About–

STUART TAYLOR: Yeah. The only issue in both cases is whether the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution bars the government from first prosecuting someone for the crime and then trying to forfeit their property in a separate proceeding, or doing the same thing in the reverse order.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Why is this case so important?

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NewsHour: Setting Limits – April 15, 1996

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KWAME HOLMAN: Gail Norton, Colorado’s Republican attorney general, is busy these days campaigning in Denver and elsewhere around the state in hopes of replacing retiring Senator Hank Brown. Norton’s Republican primary opponent is Eastern Colorado Congressman Wayne Allard. Whichever of them wins the August primary will look to the state Republican Party to help fund the fall campaign, and that funding could be increased substantially this election year if the two major political parties have their way.

Currently, all candidates in this country for Congress or the Presidency must adhere to contribution and spending limits set by the Federal Election Commission. For instance, contributors may give a maximum of $1,000 per election to a candidate, $5,000 to a state political party, and $20,000 to a national political party. But the constitutionality of the FEC limits now is being called into question, thanks to a spending dispute that erupted between two other Colorado Senate candidates a decade ago. Ten years ago, Republican Ken Kramer was campaigning with the help of President Ronald Reagan, hoping to defeat Democrat Tim Wirth. Wirth, then a popular Congressman, became the target of a $15,000 radio ad campaign paid for not by Kramer but by the Colorado Republican Party. The Colorado Democratic Party filed a complaint with the FEC that the Republicans radio buy put them over their $103,000 spending limit set by an FEC formula, but Washington lawyer Jan Baran, who represents the Colorado Republican Party, says the party’s ad fell outside FEC limits.

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Life, Death, and Imperial Judges

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

As I started to read the recent rulings of two U.S. Courts of Appeals discovering that terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to kill themselves with lethal drugs prescribed by any willing physician, I was reminded of Judge Learned Hand’s line about "Platonic Guardians."

I looked it up: "Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies," Hand wrote in 1958. "For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."

Some of the nation’s best minds think that a legal rule authorizing physician-assisted suicide "erases a fundamental ethical line and opens medical practice to unconscionable abuse," in the words of the columnist (and lapsed psychiatrist) Charles Krauthammer. He adds that any such rule would open the way for intolerable pressure from self-interested relatives and others for "the elderly and infirm to take drugs to hasten death."

On the other side, some of the nation’s best minds stress that thousands of suffering patients desperately want and need the kind of help in hastening the end that-under current law-some doctors cannot provide, and others will provide only in secrecy, for fear of being prosecuted as criminals.

It is an agonizing public policy dilemma, and one of vast importance. Both elite and popular values on the subject are evolving at warp speed, as one ethical line in the sand after another is washed away by racing medical technology and soaring medical costs, and as ever more diabolical choices are inflicted on us all.

So why should the ultimate decision on this matter come from a bunch of judges, in the guise of divining some fixed meaning for all time from a 128-year-old amendment that has nothing explicit to say about any "right to die"?

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NewsHour: Affirmative Action – March 20, 1996

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Yesterday, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an admissions policy at the University of Texas Law School which gave preference to Blacks and Hispanics. The Court ruled that the law school’s affirmative action program violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. For more on the decision, we’re joined by Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the "American Lawyer," and for "Legal Times," and a NewsHour regular. Welcome, Stuart.

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Nice to be here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH:We’re talking about this case because it has very wide implications, doesn’t it?

MR. TAYLOR: It certainly has very wide potential implications because the holding of this three-judge court is, in essence, that racial preferences in universities, admissions at the University of Texas Law school in particular, but also nationwide, are unconstitutional and must be abolished. Now if this case goes to the Supreme Court of the United States, which it almost certainly will, and if the Supreme Court adopts a similar rationale, it would have a dramatic impact. It would bar consideration of race in university law school, graduate school admissions for state institutions, not private institutions. And it would result in a dramatic reduction in a number of racial minority group members, at least Black and Hispanic Americans in those institutions.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What are the facts of the case?

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Brother, Can You Spare Some Fees?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Whitewater may not be Watergate, but the Clinton White House has apparently surpassed even the Nixon White House in generating billable hours for the Washington white-collar defense bar.

At last count, nearly 40 current and former officials of the Clinton White House alone have found it necessary to retain counsel. The Clintons and at least one senior aide have also created the first legal defense funds in history for incumbent executive branch officials-an unfortunate precedent, but perhaps a necessary one.

The legal travails of the Clintonites, and of some Reaganites before them, raise a long-term problem that Congress needs to solve, lest it plague future administrations, too.

In the words of Alan Morrison of Public Citizen Litigation Group, "Some provision must be made so that vulnerable public officials not be left without means to defend themselves and that they not have to beg for money from those who appear before them or who otherwise are affected by their official actions."

The essential problem is that anyone taking a senior governmental position these days, especially in the White House, may end up in need of legal counsel no matter how honorably she conducts herself.

That wasn’t true 20 years ago. It’s a consequence of our current culture of hair-trigger resort to criminal investigations as the ultimate weapon in partisan warfare, and of the vast resources available to independent counsel to turn over every rock in search of evidence of crime. Government service, at least in the White House, now carries a significant risk of being hauled before congressional committees and grand juries, grilled under oath, and perhaps even accused of perjury or other crimes.

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A Car Is Not a Pirate Ship

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Indonesia-Lippo-Riady-Huang-Hub-bellgate. Taiwangate. Koreagate (II). Buddhist-Temple-Goregate. Filegate. Travelgate. Paulagate. Cisnerosgate Espygate.

Where to begin?

Some speculations: The man to watch will be Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who is still trying to build a case against the president or the first lady or both. The probability that Stair will accuse one or both of crimes seems below 50-50 at this point-but not by much. And there may be less noise than expected on the congressional front, given Republicans’ fears of exposing their own dirty campaign finance laundry.

While a whole new criminal investigation may well find grist in the rivers of cash flowing from the Far East into Democratic campaign coffers-via Clinton cronies who freauented the White House-the greatest threat to the president is the same old scandal that many write off as too complicated to interest (or entertain) the public: Whitewater.

The central questions on which Starr’s team of prosecutors seems to be focusing are whether either or both of the Clintons engaged in a criminal conspiracy with their now convicted former business partners, James and Susan McDougal, to avert bankruptcy for their Whitewater Development Corp. by keeping the McDougals’ foundering Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan afloat during the mid-1980s, and to obtain money by fraud from David Hale’s Capital Management Services Inc.; and whether either or both of the Clintons have engaged ever since then in cover-up activities-both in Arkansas and in the White House-including destroying and secreting evidence, obstructing justice, and perjury.

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A Car Is Not a Pirate Ship

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision on March 4 upholding the state of Michigan’s forfeiture of Tina Bennis’ half-interest in a family car.

Her offense was… well, nothing. Her husband was the offender. He had been caught in their car receiving oral sex from a prostitute, while parked on a Detroit street after ending his shift at a steel mill. Mrs. Bennis had been at home, wondering where he was, calling the missing persons bureau.

The Court did not hold that Mrs. Bennis had reason to know of her husband’s sordid little tryst. Nor did it rely on Solicitor General Drew Days III’s incredibly lame assertion (in an amicus brief) that Mrs. Bennis had not done enough to prevent her husband from using their car to betray her. Nor did it question her claim that she had recently paid for most of the $600 car with her own hard-earned money from baby-sitting and other chores.

Rather, the Court held in Bennis v. Michigan that none of this mattered. The state not only could confiscate and sell the car (as Mrs. Bennis conceded), but could use the proceeds of her $300 share to pay its costs and keep any money that might be left over. All this, done under the authority of a state nuisance statute aimed at purging neighborhoods of prostitution, was consistent with due process of law.

This result was dictated, Chief Justice William Rehnquist held for the majority, by some precedents dating back to the era of pirate ships and privateers. Widely regarded (at least until Bennis) as having been undermined by more recent decisions, those anachronistic precedents allow governments to forfeit the interests of innocent owners of properties used for illegal purposes, based on the outmoded legal Fiction that the property is somehow the guilty party.