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Should Hofstra Law Have Hosted Lynne Stewart?

Lynne Stewart is a former lawyer who was disbarred after being convicted of aiding terrorists. Hofstra law school has invited Stewart to participate in its Sixth Biannual Legal Ethics Conference, with the press release merely describing her as someone “who has defended many unpopular clients over the years.” Wikipedia tells us that those clients included “black nationalists, members of the Weather Underground, Mafia figures, and convicted terrorists.” It also reminds us that:

Stewart was convicted of providing material support (through a press conference and allowing access by her translator) to a terrorist conspiracy to kill persons outside of the United States and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government when acting as counsel to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1996 of plotting terrorist attacks against various sites in the New York City area. Specifically, she was accused, in a federal grand jury indictment, of passing Rahman’s blessing for a resumption of terrorist operations to his fundamentalist Muslim terrorist cell in Egypt after cell members inquired whether they should continue to honor a ceasefire that was in place against the Egyptian government.

The Law Blog notes:

In his Best of the Web column, the WSJ’s James Taranto came down hard on Hofstra’s decision to invite Stewart. “So Hoftstra’s law school regards a disbarred criminal as an expert on legal ethics and someone who has been convicted of giving material support to mass murder as a champion of human rights,” he wrote. “If we ever have to hire a lawyer, we think we’ll steer clear of Hofstra grads.”

The Law Blog heard this morning from Monroe Freedman, Hofstra Law’s legal ethics guru. He says that Taranto’s column has prompted several letters to Hofstra’s dean, “ranging from angry to strident.”

Here is Freedman’s response: “Ms. Stewart is not being invited to teach trial advocacy. Implicit in lawyering at the edge is the risk of going over the edge, both ethically and legally. Like every speaker at our highly successful conferences, Stewart will speak for twenty minutes and then be subjected to sharp questioning for an equal twenty minutes. Students are more likely, therefore, to come away viewing her not as a role model, but as a cautionary lesson. That’s effective education in lawyers’ ethics, which is too often considered a dry, uninteresting, and unimportant subject.”

Law Blog Question of the Day: Who’s right, Taranto or Freedman?

Actually, it’s not a question of who’s right. It’s a question of who is being disingenuous. Hint: It’s not Taranto. Walter Olson explains:

A hasty reader might conclude from [a Freedman blog post] that the decision to bring Ms. Stewart on board was a Bollinger-and-Ahmadinejad “invite her to refute her” sort of affair. But a look at the conference announcement tells a rather different story. The banquet speaker at the conference is leftist lawyer Gerald Lefcourt, one of Stewart’s most vocal defenders in the media. And the keynote speaker? None other than Michael Tigar, Stewart’s lawyer at her trial. Are we really supposed to believe that the point of inviting her is to send students away with the lesson that her actions “[went] over the edge, both ethically and legally”?

Anyone who does believe that might be interested in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn.