Recently in Legal Issues Category

Creationist Nathaniel Abraham’s lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—which PZ Myers discussed in this post, and which Hyphoid Logic discussed at length last month—has been thrown out by a federal judge in Massachusetts for procedural problems. The judge did not need to hear oral arguments, or to issue a long opinion; in a single-sentence order he merely ruled against Abraham because he did not file the lawsuit within the proper time period after receiving a notice from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and because the defendant—Woods Hole scientist Mark Hahn—could not be personally sued under the federal law in question. Abraham argued that he did not actually receive the notice, but he failed to allege as much in his complaint, and the defendants pointed out that courts presume that such letters are received about a week after they are sent—while Abraham filed his lawsuit more than a year after it was sent.

The decision is not a ruling on the merits, and might be appealed. The case is Abraham v. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, et al., No. 07-12237 (D. Mass.)

There’s been legal action at last. XVIVO just couldn’t stand by and let their work be stolen and used for vile purpose.

Dear Mr. Craft:

This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright.

It has come to our intention that Premise Media and Rampant Films has produced a film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which is scheduled for commercial release and distribution on April 18, 2008.

The story is already up at ERV’s and Henry’s. Regular readers know that this matter has a history. Newby’s can start with links at ERV’s. NCSE has the legal letter in beautiful pdf format.

But I want to pose this question: how many theaters, if any, will show Expelled on 18 Apr 2008? And should you aid your local theaters by explaining the matter?

On April 4, 2008 at 7:00 pm CDT (GMT - April 5, 2008 at 12:00 midnight), Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, will give a talk entitled God, Darwin, and Design: Lessons from the Dover Monkey Trial. Miller was a lead witness in the Dover, Pennsylvania “intelligent design” case that began in September 2005, and which has been front-page news since it started. The talk is sponsored by the The University of Texas at Austin, which is also web-casting the event, live.

The public is invited to participate in the Live Webcast of the lecture, April 4, 2008 at 7:00 pm CT (click here for times all over the world). The webcasts are very high quality, and viewers can submit questions to the speaker through our website, and hear the speaker answer several online questions in real time. The webcasting software we use requires viewers to download a small plugin, but it is very simple and quick to install.

A link to the details of the lecture and the webcast could be found at: http://www.esi.utexas.edu/outreach/[…]tures/Miller

It is recommended that participants log in to the University of Texas at Austin link several minutes before 7 PM CDT, to have time to download the required plug-in before the Webcast begins.

What is the lecture about?

At ‘The Questionable Authority’, Mike Dunford reports on the California Creationist Lawsuit.

Several Christian schools are suing the University of California for unfairly and unconstitutionally refusing to accept a number of courses taught at Christian schools as meeting UC’s admissions criteria.

According to Inside Higher Ed the judge has made his ruling and granted partial summary judgment in favor of the UC system. Mike promises two more postings to discuss particular aspects of the ruling.

One of the posts will focus on Judge Otero’s discovery of various typical Creationist argument techniques (most notably strawmen and quote mining) in the Christian School’s claims. The second will focus on the valuable, but accidental, contribution made by Mike Behe - on behalf of the side of good science.

Part 2 has been added

and Part 3 Summary Judgment in California Creationist Case: Behe Shoots, Scores, We Get Point (Part 3 of 3)

On Uncommon Descent William Dembski claims that Richard Dawkins has admitted that life could be designed and thus wonders: “Is ID therefore scientific?”. As I will show this is a logically flawed conclusion.

First of all lets point out Intelligent Design does not claim merely that life is designed but that such design can be detected via scientific methods. In this aspect if differs from science which admits that design always remains a logical possibility, however science also accepts that if such design is ‘supernatural’ no scientific method can detect such design.

On Friday, Florida State Senator Ronda Storms introduced an anti-evolution bill to the legislature. She did so quietly, and without fanfare. No press release was issued, and so far the legislation has not received any attention in the press. It also doesn’t seem to have attracted any attention from the Discovery Institute or any of the other major anti-evolution websites, either. That’s actually a bit of a surprise, since the bill in question is remarkably similar to a “Model Academic Freedom Statute” that the Discovery Institute posted on a website that they (and a media company) set up to promote a movie.

This whole thing raises so many issues that it’s hard to decide where to start. There’s the Orwellian language of the act itself. There’s the egregious misunderstanding of the concept of academic freedom that’s contained in the bill. There’s the remarkable similarity between the bill before the Florida legislature and the Discovery Institute’s “model statute.” There’s the narrow focus of the law. There’s the lack of concern shown for “academic freedom” as it relates to anything but teachers and students who want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that evolution’s not a real, solid scientific concept. And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s just no way that I can address all of this in a single post. Fortunately, I’m confident that between the comments section for this post and whatever other bloggers may decide to write on this topic, most of the things I miss will be covered in short order.

Right now, I’m going to focus on the mockery that the circumstances surrounding this bill make of the Discovery Institute’s frequent assertions that religious beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with this sort of thing. (Yes, I know it’s hard to make a mockery of a mockery, but they’ve managed it. Again.)

Read more at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left.

Yesterday the Discovery Institute held a press conference at the capitol building in Des Moines, to announce Guillermo Gonzalez’s plans to sue Iowa State University over their decision to deny him tenure. Supposedly the lawsuit will be filed pending the rejection of an appeal to the Board of Regents, which is virtually guaranteed simply for the fact that the Regents typically uphold tenure decisions. Joining Casey Luskin, Rob Crowther, Gonzalez’s attorneys, and a few other DI folk was state Senator David Hartsuch (R-District 41).

The core of the DI’s assertion is that there were “secret tenure deliberations” aka a plan to oust Dr. Gonzalez because of his ID views.

Continue reading at Neurotopia.

By SA Smith

It is one thing to correct Michael Behe, some structure guy with zero research experience on HIV-1 evolution. But considering the sheer number of DI “fellows” who are lawyers, and the fact I’m just a biology student with zero experience in law, I found it rather strange that I caught something the DI lawyers evidently had no problem with:

NOVA has released a Press Release outlining the exciting new program. For more information visit NOVA Judgement Day Companion site or the Pressrooms at pbs.org/pressroom or Pressroom.wgbh.org The show will air on November 13, 2007 at 8pm ET/PT on PBS.

Check your local listings and spread the news

As reported by NCSE, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has withdrawn his $100,000 earmark for anti-science education: Vitter earmark withdrawn. During yesterday’s session Vitter asked that the money in the earmark be directed to other projects, insisting that he never intended—yeah, right—for the money to go towards teaching creationism.

Joshua Rosenau of “TfK” has the full exchange on his blog.

Mr. VITTER Madam President, I rise today to discuss a project I sponsored in the fiscal year 2008 Labor, Health, Human Services and Education appropriations bill. The project, which would develop a plan to promote better science-based education in Ouachita Parish by the Louisiana Family Forum, has raised concerns among some that its intention was to mandate and push creationism within the public schools. That is clearly not and never was the intent of the project, nor would it have been its effect. However, to avoid more hysterics, I would like to move the $100,000 recommended for this project by the subcommittee when the bill goes to conference committee to another Louisiana priority project funded in this bill.

Mr. HARKIN Madam President, I appreciate the sentiments by the Senator from Louisiana and accept this proposal to move the funding for this project to other priority projects for the State of Louisiana in the bill when it goes to conference committee.

Mr. SPECTER Madam President, I concur with my colleague and will agree to move these funds in conference committee.

Congratulations to everyone who contacted their senators about this earmark. The students of Louisiana owe you a debt of gratitude. You not only got the earmark withdrawn, you also got the sponsor to do it.

Kudos all around.

Antievolutionists have long sought to subvert and infiltrate the public school science classrooms, looking to turn all those lecterns into pulpits to deliver their narrow sectarian doctrines. We’ve seen takeovers of classrooms, of school boards, and the promulgation of legislation to set things up the way they’d like it. Now, we have another untoward development: not content with turning science class into Sectarian Sunday School, they want taxpayers to chip in money to serve the cause. That’s right, instead of passing a collection plate where one gets a choice of contributing or not, they do want to pick your pockets.

The Times-Picayune has the story.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., earmarked $100,000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties.

The money is included in the labor, health and education financing bill for fiscal 2008 and specifies payment to the Louisiana Family Forum “to develop a plan to promote better science education.”

More on the Austringer.

Last week, I reposted four old articles that I wrote back in 2005, when a group representing a number of Christian schools in California filed a lawsuit against the University of California claiming that UC’s rejection of several of their courses was illegal “viewpoint discrimination.” In a more recent post, I mentioned that there’s a hearing on motions for summary judgement scheduled for later this month. I also mentioned that the Christian schools claim that all they are doing is “adding a religious viewpoint” to “standard course material.” It doesn’t take a genius to see that the “viewpoint” presented in some of the textbooks used in the rejected courses is explicitly opposed to the actual science of biology. It certainly represents something very far from the “standard” course material for high school biology. (Or, for that matter, biology anywhere in the reality-based universe.) Nevertheless, the Christian schools seem to be determined to argue that they really do teach the “standard” scientific material.

And they’ve got help - an expert witness. That’s right, the Christian schools have found themselves someone who is willing to stand up and argue that a textbook that “puts the Word of God first and science second” really does teach standard science. Who, you might wonder, is the scientist brave enough to stand up to the harsh wind of reality and claim that teaching that, “man is a special creation that is completely separate from the physical universe and the animal kingdom,” is just an addition to “standard” science? Professor Michael Joseph Behe of Lehigh University, that’s who.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments can be left):

Over the last few days, I reposted a series of four articles that I wrote two years ago. Those articles discuss a California lawsuit filed by a group of Christian schools against the University of California. They are suing in an attempt to force UC to recognize some of their classes as meeting the requirements that UC sets for high school students who are applying for admission to the system. Several subjects are involved in the suit, but as a biologist I’m mostly interested in the biology courses that are involved.

At the moment, the next scheduled event in the case comes on September 24^th, when the judge will hear arguments on motions for summary judgement. I’m not a legal expert, and I don’t spend as much time following Constitutional Law for fun as Ed does, but I’ve got a feeling that the motion for summary judgement filed by the Christian schools will fail, and the case will go to trial. A motion for summary judgement can only be granted if there are no significant disputes about material facts in the case. In this particular case, at least as far as the science books are concerned, there is a significant dispute about the facts.

The plaintiffs (the Christian schools) claim that their courses, “add to standard content a banned book, a religious viewpoint that God created man and woman, or the viewpoint of creation or Intelligent Design,” and that this constitutes “viewpoint discrimination.” (Brief for Summary Judgement p. 20). Someone from the Association of Christian Schools International, one of the plaintiffs in the case, left a comment on a couple of the old articles that elaborated a bit on that - the case, he claimed, is not about creationism, it’s about “illegal viewpoint discrimination.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments can be left):

The Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin contends in this post that librarians in public schools are “censoring” Intelligent Design by refusing to put copies of Michael Behe and Philip Johnson books on their shelves. Of course, Luskin cites the famous Supreme Court decision Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982), claiming that it holds that the First Amendment is violated when school districts refuse to stock certain books on their library shelves.

The Montana Law Review symposium on the Kitzmiller decision has been posted on line. It includes an article by the DI’s David De Wolf, John West, and Casey Luskin, then a masterful response by Peter Irons, then a rebuttal to that by De Wolf, et al. There’s little here that Thumb readers won’t already know—although it’s always nice to see an article like Irons’, which not only makes all the right points, but does so in a wonderfully readable, non-technical style. We’ve responded at length to the DI’s accusation that the Kitzmiller decision is an “activist” decision, but I did want to say a bit more on this. (It appears on pp. 14-17 of the first De Wolf, et al., article.)

It looks like Wendell Bird‘s lawsuit against the University of California is going to trial. This is the lawsuit bought by some private Christian high schools (Association of Christian Schools International et al., or ACSI) against the U.C. (Roman Stearns, special assistant to the U.C. president, et al.), protesting the fact that the U.C. doesn’t give credit for certain courses taught at these private schools. Not all of the classes involved are science classes, but the science classes at issue make use of Bob Jones University textbooks which are full of fake fundamentalist “science.” Private religious high schools have the right to teach whatever silliness they want (although even many private Christian schools teach evolution without problems), but it is rather dubious to assert that a top institution like the U.C. should be forced to drop all of its standards and give credit for classes that teach creationist falsehoods.

NCSE is not involved in this case so I don’t know much more than anyone else about the details of it. The legal issues are rather different than in Kitzmiller v. Dover – here, the creationists are the plaintiffs, and as I understand it, the constitutional issue is not the Establishment Clause but the Free Exercise Clause. ACSI asserts that the U.C.’s standards amount to religious discrimination. However, I do have a rather direct interest in the case myself, since I will be a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley this fall, and will be a teaching assistant in the evolution course. Will the undergraduates that the U.C. admits be prepared, or will they require tedious remedial education to re-do all the biology they were taught incorrectly the first time around?

Through the grapevine, I have heard a few tidbits about the case that will interest people. It looks like the trial will be another battle of the experts:

The PNAS Early Edition webpage has just posted a series of papers from the December 2006 National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium, “In the Light of Evolution: Adaptation and Complex Design,” organized by Francisco Ayala and John Avise. The series of papers, on topics ranging from color vision to beetle horns, is now available (I will post the list below the fold). Eugenie C. Scott (aka Genie) was invited to speak at this meeting about evolution education and the history of opposition to it, and the speakers wrote papers to be published in PNAS and a forthcoming NAS volume.

Genie brought me on as a coauthor on the paper she was asked to write. This became:

This was recently posted on CSEblogs.com – the blogs of Creation Science Evangelism, i.e. Kent Hovind’s ministry. It comes from Paul Abramson who is a longtime supporter and associate of Hovind. I will post it without further commentary, since it is pretty shocking by itself. We don’t know anything more about it than this. It could indicate anything from Hovind committing some sort of serious infraction of prison rules, all the way down to a Hovind fan’s histrionic misinterpretation of some routine event such as a prison transfer. It seems a little hard for me to believe that Hovind would do something worthy of solitary, so who knows.

Anyway, here it is… (from the comments section)

Yesterday, I wrote about Wiley Interscience and the Society of Chemical Industry making legal threats against fair use: Wiley Interscience: Where Science Meets Legal Threats.

Today, Shelley Batts received an apology from them:

We apologise for any misunderstanding. In this situation the publisher would typically grant permission on request in order to ensure that figures and extracts are properly credited. We do not think there is any need to pursue this matter further.

Congrats to everyone who helped get the word out about the threats. You helped Shelley and the rest of the science-bloggers out.

Shelley Batts over at Retrospectacle was contacted yesterday by a representative of Wiley Interscience, who objected to her fair use of part of one figure from a paper. Shelley has posted the exchange on her blog.

Wiley’s legal threats are baseless because fair use allows people “to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism.” In addition, this move by Wiley is very stupid given that Shelley was promoting a paper published in one of their journals. She was providing good press for them. But in one stupid move Wiley has turned that good press into bad press.

Because of this I will not be publishing in any Wiley journal for the foreseeable future, and I call on others to do the same.

If you want to email the journal about this, here is the contact information.

Update: Wiley has a record of acting dubiously. (via Afarensis.)

Update: An apology has been issued.

Professor Jay Wexler’s article on the Kitzmiller case, Kitzmiller And The “Is It Science?” Question, 5 First Amend. L. Rev. 90 (2006), has been the source of some glee for Creationist Casey Luskin. In the article, Wexler contends that Judge Jones’s finding that Intelligent Design isn’t science was unnecessary and unwise. Luskin, never one for, you know, legal thinking, immediately pounced on the article to say that Wexler “agreed in print with my position on this question.” Now that I’ve seen the article, I can say that, as is typical for Luskin, this is at best a half truth.

Tomorrow, Talk of the Nation/Science Friday is doing a show with Edward Humes, author of Monkey Girl (blog, website), Randy Olson, director of Flock of Dodos, and yours truly, author of this spiffy blogpost.

We are in the second hour, so it should be on from 12-1 Pacific time. Apart from the radio, NPR is streamed live from many websites, and the Talk of the Nation archived shows are put online a few hours later.

Well, I was having a hard time imagining this one anyway:

Anti-Darwin Suit Dismissed

The Oktyabrsky District Court in St. Petersburg on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit filed by Maria Shraiber, a 15-year-old who argued that being taught the theory of evolution in school violated her civil rights, Interfax reported.

The court also dismissed Shraiber’s request that the government provide her with a written apology for offending her religious beliefs. Shraiber’s representatives vowed to appeal the ruling to St. Petersburg’s City Court. (MT)

Next country to watch: the Dominican Republic.

Convicted felon Kent Hovind’s sentencing was today, and again the Pensacola News-Journal has the story:

Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.

After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:

– Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.

– Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.

– Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.

Not knowing anything about sentencing, I had figured Hovind would get time already served plus probation or something. I guess not. Probably with good behavior this will become 5 years or less of actual prison time. The moral of the story: living in your own personal alternate reality works for only so long. That, and don’t tick off the IRS.

Today, the Baltimore Sun has the first detailed news article on Russia’s 21^st-century Scopes Monkey Trial. It comes complete with monkeys:

The Shraibers announced their plans for the lawsuit at a March news conference that featured free bananas. In July, when they mailed the paperwork to court, they were accompanied by an actor in a monkey suit - a stunt since dubbed “stupid” by Romanov, who asked that the monkey not come near him.

Many were taken by surprise by the Cobb County School Board’s decision to settle the Selman case, give up their practice of putting evolution “warning labels” in textbooks, and pay $167,000 in fees to the plaintiffs. They had fought this case for four years, and succeeded in getting the Court of Appeals to vacate the district court decision for a retrial. Perhaps the third time Cobb’s sticker got in front of a court would be the charm.

Well, the reality was that this was not likely at all.

The University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities has put online the videos from this fall’s “Difficult Dialogs” series. Included are talks by Ken Miller, Judge Jones, Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and Michael Behe. We had some previous discussion of the Behe talk here. (Apparently Behe was the ID guy who “discovered” that lawyers file a lot of paper with the court before, during, and after a trial, including Proposed Findings of Fact, which of course would be obvious if one had looked at the Kitzmiller documents archive that NCSE has maintained since the trial began.)

The funny thing about the Discovery Institute’s Media/Judge Jones Complaint Division is how it deals with defeat. Oftentimes we will see weeks and weeks of vigorous posting about this or that political fight – but then, if they lose, they often just completely ignore it, like nothing happened.

Because I’ve apparently been living in a cave, I only just heard the full story of the “Tripoli Six”: five foreign nurses and a doctor that the Libyan government has imprisoned for seven years, tortured, and sentenced to death by firing squad for allegedly causing an outbreak of 400 cases of AIDS in a Libyan children’s hospital in 1998. Apart from the problems with torture and firing squads, the major problem here is that these poor people didn’t do it. The infections were caused by poor hygiene practices, like reusing needles, that existed at the hospital long before these nurses arrived in 1998. But the Libyan government is scapegoating some foreigners to distract the populace from the fact that the government is the real criminal here.

What does this have to do with evolution, you ask? Well, out here in the real world (outside of Libya and creationist circles), the way you tell where an HIV strain actually came from, and when, is by doing a standard molecular phylogeny. If you are a creationist who doesn’t believe in this sort of thing then you should really just stuff it, because the criminal courts, relying on their “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, have been using phylogenetic methods as forensic evidence for years (so much so that an HIV phylogeny was used on the TV show CSI).

If you needed another proof that the Founding Fathers were pretty smart guys when they noted that fights over religion are intractable and produce strife because they involve ultimate questions decided according to dictates of conscience, we have yet another proof. In recent weeks there has been a resurgence of internicine fighting amongst the pro-science blogging community over the issue of religion. The Holy Wars threads involve the debate between two camps: I think the camps are neutrally described as follows (feel free to hurl invective my way if you disagree).

The latest from the Pensacola News-Journal is that Kent Hovind is in jail until sentencing in January, and the jury ordered the Hovinds to forfeit over $400k to the government:

This just in from the Pensacola News-Journal:

‘Dr. Dino,’ wife guilty

Jury deliberations took about three hours.

A federal jury has convicted Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, of tax fraud.

Hovind faces a maximum of 288 years in prison. His wife faces up to 225 years. Her charges include aiding and abetting her husband with 44 counts of evading bank-reporting requirements.

And at the end:

Defense lawyers for the Hovinds rested their case on Wednesday without presenting evidence or calling witnesses.

My question: if the Hovinds weren’t going to put on a defense, why didn’t they just make a plea bargain agreement, avoid the ordeal of a trial, and get reduced sentences?