University of Oregon Refuses to Defend Academic Freedom

Found this mentioned on Leiter's Law School Reports. The first few paragraphs of the article:

When Merle H. Weiner was hired as a law professor at the University of Oregon, she was told that one of her duties was to write articles and books — and she did just that, publishing extensively on her areas of expertise, one of which is domestic violence.

But Weiner found out this year that even if the university expects her to publish, she was on her own when she faced a threatened suit over one of her articles, even though the university never contested the quality of the article and even though she had obtained legal opinions that she would prevail in court — if only someone had agreed to pay the bills necessary to fight.

When no one would commit to paying the anticipated legal bills, the journal that published Weiner — also unable to pay for a defense — removed from its electronic archive the reference that led to the threatened lawsuit. While the University of Oregon’s lawyer had urged her to have the journal do just that as a way of avoiding a suit, Weiner opposed this action as giving in to a threat and denying her the right to publish her work in full.

She said that the incident has hurt her ability to do her work on domestic violence and raises issues for any scholar who may publish on works that might lead someone to want to sue them.

“Any time any alleged batterer wants to threaten suit, I’m going to have to defend myself, no matter how unmeritorious the suit is,” Weiner said. “If my institution wants me to be doing my job, they need to be standing behind me.”

The American Association of University Professors agrees that in cases like this, colleges should provide a defense for their professors. And Oregon’s Faculty Senate is now considering whether to ask the university to change its policy of not providing such defense. But university officials defend their approach — and one prominent academic who was herself sued for her writings, and who won in court, warns that there may be a down side to having colleges defend their professors’ writings.