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I had never the story that Arthur Anderson was prosecuted with trumped-up charges. Is the author's account accurate?

• grellas 17y ago
  Arthur Andersen was convicted in the summer of 2002 for having obstructed justice by shredding Enron documents. See sample article from that period: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2047122.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2047122.stm. The author's point, I think, is that the vagueness in the law is what is unjust, not the idea that prosecutors make up the laws as they go. In other words, the laws give prosecutors shall vast discretion that they can be applied in ways that are unfair and even ruinous to companies such as to deny them basic due process protections (and, of course, the Andersen conviction was ultimately overturned). More broadly stated, when language is corrupted so that nothing is clear, everyone acts potentially at his peril because legal outcomes - that is, punitive legal outcomes that can harm or destroy lives - rest on the whim of enforcement authorities who have broad powers to punish based on vague criteria affording no checks on their power to abuse their discretion. This is how the author lumps college speech codes with Justice Department abuses and ties it all back to Orwell's famous piece on language and its uses and abuses. It is actually a well-written piece, certainly so from a lawyer perspective.