Supreme Court Hearing: Marquette’s Lawyer Eviscerated

The Supreme Court hearing yesterday on our case, McAdams v. Marquette, was a hoot to watch. While six judges will vote on our case, only five sat on the panel (Abrahamson was not present).

Three of the judges were openly incredulous about Marquette’s claims, voiced by their lawyer, Ralph Weber.

This, unfortunately, does not guarantee the court will come down on our side. But it was fun to watch.

We’ll blog later on some of the details of the arguments, but a highlight of the proceedings was Justice Gableman catching Weber in a flat out misrepresentation.

But some background. Weber was arguing that the court should accept the finding of the Faculty Hearing Committee that we were guilty of misconduct in blogging about Cheryl Abbate, philosophy instructor who told a student he was not allowed to voice opposition to gay marriage since such an opinion about the “homophobic” and “offensive” to any gays in the class.

Gableman questioned the fairness of the Faculty Hearing Committee by bringing up information that had been withheld from the committee by Marquette. One key piece of information was the reason Cheryl Abbate left Marquette.


Abbate, in fact, testified to the Faculty Hearing Committee and cried when she was describing her horrible ordeal of receiving a lot of e-mail messages, some of which were vulgar and abusive (but none were threatening).

All the while she was bragging via private e-mail about how happy she was to be able to leave Marquette for a much superior Ph.D. program at Colorado.

P.S.

Kudos to Badger Pundit for excellent coverage of this case, including posting the video above.