On Tuesday, appellate judge Keith Harper and professors Richard J. Pierce Jr. from George Washington University and Jamin Raskin from AU's Washington College of Law debated Pierce's academic article "Judge Lamberth's Reign of Terror at the Department of Interior? A Debate About Cobell v. Norten."
In the case Cobell v. Norten, Native Americans filed a suit against the U.S. Department of Interior for mismanagement of funds. A restraining order was granted to prevent the Department of Interior from selling Indian trust land.
In his article Pierce criticizes federal judge Royce Lamberth on his abusive use of judicial power over several court cases. Pierce claims Judge Lamberth is unnecessarily holding 37 government workers in contempt and forced the Department of Interior to deprive all of its computers of Internet access for years.
According to Pierce, 22 of the 37 officials haven't been told what they have been charged with, and Judge Lamberth is purposefully dragging out their cases because civil contempt charges cannot be appealed until after the case is over.
"The Internet was shut down because the computers were vulnerable to hackers," Pierce said. "This Internet shutdown has affected the United States in adverse ways."
According to Harper, who acted as plaintiff class counsel in Cobell v. Norten, the article leaves out anything that might hurt Pierce's argument, such as the inadequacies of the Department of Interior. These omissions include the lack of an audit trail that would follow the movement of possible hackers in the system, a lack of a working trust system for Native Americans for over a century and the unresponsiveness of the Department of Interior to fix these issues.
"It's interesting to see the government officials portrayed as the victims in this case," Harper said. "Those officials are fine. They're rich and are using tax money to fund their lawyers for the court case ... The real victims are the Indians who have had their trusts horribly mismanaged for hundreds of years."
Raskin also said that the defendant continues to mismanage Native Americans' trust funds.
However, Pierce maintained his position.
"I agree that the trust has horribly been mismanaged, and I congratulate Raskin's and Harper's initial victories," Pierce said. "But my quarrel is with the behavior of the judge."
According to Pierce, a judge needs both strength and judgment.
"In my opinion, he's a control freak," said Pierce speaking about Lamberth.
Harper and Raskin claim that Pierce's article is highly deceptive.
According to Harper, the Department of Interior is a corrupt department that lies and destroys documents and it takes a courageous judge like Lambert to bring justice.
Raskin compared Pierce's article to an academic drive-by-shooting, stating that the article did nothing to further academic knowledge or social justice.
Pierce disagreed.
"I have written hundreds of articles, and I have never been prouder of any article than the one that sparked this debate," Pierce said.
All parties agreed that the most important question was what to do next and they encouraged law school students to become active lawyers in working on social justice.
