Some feminist lawyers side with Trump and DeVos. [View all]

[LAS14]

Last edited Mon Sep 18, 2017, 08:56 AM - Edit history (2)

Looks like I'm in good company. I tried to get a conversation started on this a few days ago (see first link). Now I see that great minds run.... See Globe article in second link.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029586036

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/14/surprisingly-some-feminist-lawyers-side-with-trump-and-devos-campus-assault-policy/ArigBzO86tERWpDW17DbTI/story.html?s_campaign=8315

What do the rest of you think?

I hear that the Globe is asking for payment. I'm allowed two paragraphs, right?

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week announced plans to revise the nation’s guidelines on campus sexual assault, the predictable din of outrage drowned out the applause from some unlikely corners of college campuses: Many liberals actually approve.

Groups of Harvard Law scholars, feminist lawyers, and other university professors had long argued that the Obama-era policy for policing student sexual charges was unfair, creating a Kafkaesque system that presumed guilt rather than innocence. Now, those academics find themselves atypically aligned with the Trump administration on an issue as contentious as sexual violence.

...

Covering faculty and students, the new [Obama] guidelines demanded that schools address every accusation and adopt a weaker standard of evidence than some had already been using. Rather than proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt, as in a criminal trial, or offering “clear and convincing evidence” that an offense was committed, it called for claims to be adjudicated based on a “preponderance of evidence” — to determine whether guilt was “more likely than not.”

The Globe article declares that this made the bar lower than for any other campus infraction.

....

When DeVos raised such issues last week, legions of feminists, distrustful of a president who had bragged about his sexual conquests, bristled at the sound of it. But critics in academia and law had been voicing those same complaints for years. In 2014, 28 Harvard Law professors published an open letter in The Boston Globe criticizing Harvard’s then-new policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”

As I understand it, the DeVos policy simply rescinds the Obama-era policy.