Law Professor Sues Dean for Defamation

Widener Law Professor Lawrence Connell has filed suit against the law school's dean, Linda Ammons, for defamation over accusations that he is racist and sexist.

Connell faced trumped up charges of offending of handful of minority students last year. Connell hired a lawyer and responded to the charges. They were recently dismissed by a panel of fellow law professors only to be reinstated by Ammons.

Connell is white and conservative. Ammons is black and liberal.

Connell's formal and convincing response to the original charges can be found here.

Here is the press release about the suit from Connell's attorney Tom Neuberger. It begins:

Today, conservative tenured law professor Lawrence Connell announced that Dean Linda Ammons has retaliated against him after the law school tenured faculty refused to join her vendetta against him and it refused to fire him.

On March 7th the tenured faculty Informal Committee of Inquiry upheld Connell’s academic freedom and dismissed her charges against Connell. The lack of any basis for her charges was abundantly clear when anyone reviews Connell’s 39 page sworn affidavit which was filed with the Committee.

But, after he praised the faculty for its courage, Connell warned that Ammons might retaliate against him and take her partisan crusade to a more sympathetic forum over which she had total control, instead of independent and fair minded tenured faculty. And she did so, just three days later on March 10th and the legal papers were just delivered by mail to Connell yesterday.

On March 10th just days after Connell’s sworn affidavit was posted on line, Ammons had two female minority law students in the class of 2012 refile their prior false charges against Connell but still not under oath. Now Connell must defend the charges the Faculty dismissed before an administrative body much more favorable to Ammons, which Connell’s attorney Thomas S. Neuberger describes as a “hanging kangaroo court.”

And ends:

“I will do everything in my power to save this man’s career and hold these two students accountable for their falsehoods in a court of law, under sworn oath, and not under the protection of this renegade autocratic Dean.”

How about that?

A copy of the lawsuit can be found here. It's a pip.