Via a press release from the American Tradition Institute we learn that former UVA Prof. Michael Mann has been granted leave to join the ongoing legal tussle over whether the emails he wrote during his tenure should be made public. From the release:
In an invective-laden argument lacking in any principled or cogent reference to the law, attorneys for Michael Mann asked the court to approve his participation in ATI’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia. Ruling from the bench and offering no specific reason for his decision, Judge Finch granted Dr. Mann’s motion.
ATI welcomes Dr. Mann to the case. Now he will have to defend his email content before a neutral court and offer more than slurs and innuendo to support his contention that he can hide his behavior and his emails from the public who paid for them in the first place.
That should prove enormously entertaining. But just as fun will be watching the lather the UVA faculty works itself into on another matter before the court:
Also before the court was UVA’s motion to modify the protective order. UVA and ATI had previously negotiated an agreement that allowed ATI attorneys to select examples of emails to use in later legal arguments, thus reducing the court’s burden of review from 12,000 emails to about 50 or less. UVA faculty was furious that its attorneys had agreed to allow ATI to make that selection and demanded they seek to shift that duty back to the University. The court rejected UVA’s approach. Admitting that the trust between the parties no longer allowed either UVA or ATI to select the examples, the court ordered them to come up with an independent third party who will select the example emails. If UVA and ATI cannot come to an agreement by December 20th, the court will pick someone to do the job.
Now for the long, tedious argument over who qualifies as an “independent third party.”
Prof. Mann’s lawyer has made his choice known to the court:
…his attorney stated in open court that the only person “in the universe” qualified to select example emails was Mann himself. The court rejected that notion by simply ignoring it.
The court missed a terrific opportunity to ask whether Mann’s attorney had conducted research into his universal contention — run it by the folks at SETI, perhaps, or the Amazing Kreskin. Or God.
