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I have a colleague who does environmental litigation. (Think Erin Brockovich.) They have a big civil case against a large energy company in a southern, “energy-

• CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I'm curious if that approach to eliminating expert witnesses passes legal muster.
  • stronglikedan 5y ago
    Doesn't matter if no one is held accountable. We don't have a "legal" problem in the US. We have an accountability problem, particularly amongst the "elites".
• josefresco 5y ago
  This seems like clear "witness intimidation" aka "Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant" https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512 (b)Whoever knowingly uses intimidation, threatens, or corruptly persuades another person, or attempts to do so, or engages in misleading conduct toward another person, with intent to— (1)influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding; (2)cause or induce any person to— (A)withhold testimony, or withhold a record, document, or other object, from an official proceeding; (B)alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal an object with intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; (C)evade legal process summoning that person to appear as a witness, or to produce a record, document, or other object, in an official proceeding; or (D)be absent from an official proceeding to which such person has been summoned by legal process; or
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Cannot prove it unless the victim was in a state that allows one party consent audio recording and was recording audio. Although Florida is the only southern state that requires all party consent for recording audio, and I presume the previous poster was talking about Texas. Smartphones have solved the recording audio problem, so presumably it would have been possible.
    • smnrchrds 5y ago
      Even then, they will end up not firing the employee then and there, and instead find an excuse to fire them a couple of months later.
      • lemoncookiechip 5y ago
        Or make his work-life a living hell so he quits himself.
        • earleybird 5y ago
          Which has a name: constructive dismissal
    • vageli 5y ago
      > Cannot prove it unless the victim was in a state that allows one party consent audio recording and was recording audio. Although Florida is the only southern state that requires all party consent for recording audio, and I presume the previous poster was talking about Texas. Smartphones have solved the recording audio problem, so presumably it would have been possible. Is this true even when gathering evidence of a crime?
      • kodah 5y ago
        California has the same law as Florida. Edit: the laws are the same, and you can't use an illegal recording in a court -- expressly. If you try to give an illegal recording to the news you'll likely get taken in civil court.
• ianai 5y ago
  Agree. With all the anti-democratic practices being rolled out across the states it’s pretty scary to imagine things even a year from now and a long time forward. Life threats against election officials and all the way up to Senators. Gerrymandering. Even the SCOTUS is biased. Seems civics in the US are about to be rigged for one party rule.
  • jtbayly 5y ago
    Which party? Presumably the one that has control of the House, Senate, and Oval Office?
    • themitigating 5y ago
      He's talking about states
    • alistairSH 5y ago
      GOP has the majority of state governors. GOP has the majority of state legislatures. Both of the above are currently drawing Congressional districts based on the latest census data. Both of the above are currently rolling out voting rules that are nominally about preventing fraud (of which there is zero evidence of anything widespread) but will impact the ability of people to vote.
      • scohesc 5y ago
        This is what I don't understand. Why can't legislators be proactive when it comes to protecting voting rights? We don't need to see any evidence of fraud to ensure the safety of voting rights.
        • analog31 5y ago
          Gerrymandering erases any hope that they will take up a genuine interest in voting rights when they can just manipulate the entire system in their own favor.
• ModernMech 5y ago
  As a professor, I think the actions of The University of Florida are abhorrent. I would never want to work in an environment that kowtows to politics. There are enough political considerations within a University, but having to deal with state politics as well? Count me out. At the same time, he doesn’t have tenure? So they are actually fully within their rights to do this, and really no one should be surprised. But here is my question: the prosecutors couldn’t find any tenured professors to help them in their lawsuit? Because the University can’t say anything to them about it; a tenured (full, not typically associate) professor has the right to use the name of their institution without their permission. It seems to me to be an expert witness, one would desire the use of the UoF credentials.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    And there's no shortage of tenured professors who resent their employer but stick around because tenure.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • klyrs 5y ago
    > So they are actually fully within their rights to do this, and really no one should be surprised. They have the power, nobody should be surprised that they flex it. Maybe. Do you feel that it's always ethical to perform every action that is within your legal rights? Is the legal system devoid of examples, where an act was legal until it was exercised in excess, and found to be unethical? "Surprised" doesn't describe my response to this abuse of power. That would be "outrage".
    • hindsightbias 5y ago
      Justice Scalia used to argue that torture didn’t meet the 8th ammendment cruel or unusual punishmenents clause because it wasn’t punishment. It was an interrogation technique and they hadn’t been convicted. We don’t have court rulings on “enhanced” interrogation techniques so they can just be rolled out whenever someone thinks they can get away with it.
• kodah 5y ago
  I'm not surprised. Our schools have become increasingly political institutions in left and right form. The question I have is, as an independent, how do you stave it off completely?
  • baldeagle 5y ago
    Make districts competitive. As long as the measure (votes in an election district) can be shaped such that winning the primary (initial election to determine the rep. for each party) basically promises a win in the general (an election where one rep from each party competes), polarization will go up and moderation will go down. Once districts are competitive, reps will face more pressure to the will of the people, as opposed to the people in just their party.
    • dahfizz 5y ago
      How would this work in deeply red or blue states? If you redraw the districts in California to put all the red voters together, that district will be competitive, but you have gerrymandered all the other districts to be blue forever. I think districts should represent sections of the geographic population. Its fine for a district to be uncompetetive if the general population in that region have a strong lean one way or the other.
      • xenophonf 5y ago
        In practice, it means establishing non-partisan redistricting commissions, taking that power away from the legislature or the political parties: https://www.nonprofitvote.org/nonpartisan-redistricting-citizens-not-legislators-in-charge/ https://www.nonprofitvote.org/nonpartisan-redistricting-citi...
        • baldeagle 5y ago
          This is a good response. I think California already does things like this, by having a non-partisan redistricting process. Texas, on the other hand, could barely more embrace parternship.
• debacle 5y ago
  The problem is that people are all for consolidation of power when it's going to further their ends. The American political system has become completely unprincipled, largely as a result of decades long attacks on moderates.
• ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  Good argument FOR the existence of tenure, if nothing else.
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Which calls into question the perception of authority and freedom from bias that academia tends to have. We should all be a little more skeptical. Nobody should be above scrutiny based on their job title or profession, their prior work, or anything else.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    I'm curious as how this relates to the topic at hand.
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      How the trustworthiness of academics being affected by academic institutions pressuring them, relates to examples of universities forbidding and threatening their academics not to speak freely about inconvenient topics? I'm not really sure how to explain it better. Is there something particular aspect of what I wrote that was confusing or poorly worded?
      • x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
        Because the issue is that the state is forbidding academics from speaking at trials, and you are roping in right-wing disdain for academia under the guise of "bias".
        • throwawaylinux 5y ago
          > Because the issue is that the state is forbidding academics from speaking at trials, I don't see how you can't fathom how they are related. > and you are roping in right-wing disdain for academia under the guise of "bias". I'm making a simple observation about reality, motives, cause and effect. If you think that is some right-wing conspiracy theory or something that's your problem, not mine. It seems you are incapable of addressing what I wrote without resorting to ad hominmens.
• curryst 5y ago
  It's because government power has creeped to a degree where it's no longer feasible to inflict any kind of punishment, so accountability is impossible. We basically have the options of complaining on the internet, complaining in person at a protest, or full on violent revolt. They've removed all the options to revolt in a way that harms the government without you needing to be ready to die for the cause. Something like 10% of people fought in the Revolutionary War. I couldn't find easy stats on what % of the population participated in pro-Civil Rights Movement protests, but I'm curious if anyone has them. Both BLM and antivaxxers seem to have enough popular support that the government should be having difficulty controlling them. They don't seem to be having that difficulty, though. BLM is still around, but the change has been fairly slight. The government was able to largely ignore it. The antivaxxers remain to be seen, but I suspect all the restrictions will be effective in enforcing compliance. Citizens no longer have a way to protest that the government really needs to care about. You can't refuse to pay taxes. They'll just seize your accounts. And you can't just use cash, because I can't pay a lot of my bills in cash. You can't refuse to comply, because they'll just cut your legs out from under you. No more job, no more driver's license, no more traveling, etc, etc. I certainly wouldn't try the Boston Tea Party today. You'd be in jail before you could even tell anyone what you'd done. I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think the government derives its power from the will of the people anymore. At some point, it very much feels like that flipped, and the people derive their power from the will of the government.
  • blindmute 5y ago
    Nothing whatsoever has changed about the power imbalance between people and government. The only thing different between the tea party and now is that back then, a lot of people were willing to kill, be killed, and be jailed for their political beliefs. Almost no one at all is still willing to risk this. I could write a whole thesis, and I'm sure someone has, about the decline of honor or idealism or whatever you want to call this spirit. Point is, the valuation of the self has never been so high in history before, nor the comforts. Who is going to risk death by cop today when they have such comfortable lives? And it's not just comforts, but a change in attitides; the tea party folk were quite comfortable, more than most today, and they were absolutely prepared for jail.