How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/how_corrupted_language_moved_f.html

by cwan • 16 years ago

69 7 16 years ago

arohner• 16 years ago

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

grellas• 16 years 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.

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.

telemachos• 16 years ago

What's next: an article about the War on Christmas (TM) by Bill O'Reilly?

greenlblue• 16 years ago

My understanding of justice systems in general was that this kind of thing is the status quo. Anyone who has ever been disciplined in high school or college should be aware of such things. The severity of your punishment depends on how "nice" the people doing the punishing are and not on the severity of your crime.

Enra2• 16 years ago

I would have been in such deep shit at an american college.

marciovm123• 16 years ago

Very interesting. I went to school at UC Berkeley in 2001 and my impression was that the school that spawned the free speech movement had in many ways morphed into a school that limited speech the most, much in the way the author suggests. However, while the "official" speech channels were heavily censored there was always a very active underground channel that had no censoring whatsoever.

The speed of updates on the internet is making those underground channels more difficult to suppress (as people note about things like the recent protests in Iran) so the threat from powerful bureaucracies like the government and academia on the free-flow of information is likely decreasing.

_delirium• 16 years ago

The direction seems backwards to me. Vague criminal laws have had the purpose and effect he describes for centuries. Before the current crop of vague criminal laws, people used to be brought up on charges like "tending to undermine the public morals".

How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World

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