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Lynne Stewart at Hofstra Law

We have been following with some interest the flap over Lynne Stewart’s invitation participate in an ethics program at Hofstra law school. Here’s a clip from the latest NLJ story on the subject:

“I think the chance to hear people with different views is the entire basis of the First Amendment,” said student Willie Geddish.

In an e-mail to students last week, {Hofstra Interim Dean Nora V.] Demleitner said that the school had received some “angry commentary” about the invitation to Stewart. She said Stewart “is not speaking as an expert in ethics but rather will provide the audience with a unique case study of what it means to lawyer at or beyond the edge.”

She stressed that, “All of the invited conference faculty have stories to tell about the dangers and difficulties of advocating for controversial and even abhorrent clients and causes. The Law School does not support or endorse any particular speaker’s views, but instead seeks to present the opportunity for the audience, which consists largely of practicing lawyers, law professors and you, to listen to different perspectives, and to question and debate conclusions.”

Lynne Stewart is a convicted felon. She has been disbarred. She gave material aid and assistance to a convicted terrorist, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to bomb bridges, tunnels and landmark buildings in Manhattan. The Sheik’s followers were among the terrorists who car bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And, of course, since they failed ot bring it down, Osama bin Laden targeted it on 9/11.

At the very least, if you lie down with fleas, you get up with fleas. Yet, Walter Olson observes that Stewart is more than just a lawyer representing a client:

Secret prison wiretaps leave no doubt that Stewart broke the law in the manner alleged. And she has forthrightly acknowledged her ideological solidarity with Abdul Rahman as a foe of American imperialism, and her support for “directed violence” against “the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions.”

We are not talking about “views.” We are not talking about “perspectives.” We are not talking about lawyering “at the edge.” We are talking about a New York law school hosting a facilitator, aider, and abettor of terrorists who targeted New York. Remember:

The 1993 World Trade Center attack was, it is generally held, an attempt to make one of the towers fall over onto the other, collapsing both, and then sending a huge plume of cyanide gas into New York City. Assuming every single planned aspect of the attack had followed through, tens of thousands would have died. This would have been an unforgettable holocaust across the city as the towers toppled onto whatever lay in the direction they fell.

And it gets worse. Again, let’s listen to Walter Olson:

Joining Stewart’s panel will be attorneys Ron Kuby and Richard P. Mauro. Kuby preceded Stewart in representing Abdul Rahman, and has stridently denounced Stewart’s prosecution in the press. Mauro, a Utah criminal-defense attorney, has been involved in unrelated controversies in which lawyers for unpopular defendants have faced dangers of personal legal jeopardy - a theme, of course, that Stewart’s partisans would very much like to associate with her claims to martyrdom.

Are we really supposed to believe that the point of assembling this panel was to send students away with the lesson that Stewart’s actions went “over the edge, both ethically and legally”?

Indeed, the overall lineup for the three-day conference looks very unlike the lion’s-den model, and a good deal closer to the “rally for credit.” The banquet speaker turns out to be leftist lawyer Gerald Lefcourt, another of Stewart’s most vocal defenders. And the keynote speaker is none other than Michael Tigar - who represented Stewart at her trial.

In this light, the ludicrious comments of Geddish and Demleitner suggest a degree of moral relativism so extreme as to suggest they are entirely lacking a moral center. Or maybe just minds so steeped in political correctness as to be incapable of rational thought.