

How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World - cwan
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/02/how_corrupted_language_moved_f.html

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marciovm123
Very interesting. I went to school at UC Berkeley in 2001 and my impression
was that the school that spawned the free speech movement had in many ways
morphed into a school that limited speech the most, much in the way the author
suggests. However, while the "official" speech channels were heavily censored
there was always a very active underground channel that had no censoring
whatsoever.

The speed of updates on the internet is making those underground channels more
difficult to suppress (as people note about things like the recent protests in
Iran) so the threat from powerful bureaucracies like the government and
academia on the free-flow of information is likely decreasing.

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greenlblue
My understanding of justice systems in general was that this kind of thing is
the status quo. Anyone who has ever been disciplined in high school or college
should be aware of such things. The severity of your punishment depends on how
"nice" the people doing the punishing are and not on the severity of your
crime.

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arohner
I had never the story that Arthur Anderson was prosecuted with trumped-up
charges. Is the author's account accurate?

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grellas
Arthur Andersen was convicted in the summer of 2002 for having obstructed
justice by shredding Enron documents. See sample article from that period:
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2047122.stm>.

The author's point, I think, is that the _vagueness_ in the law is what is
unjust, not the idea that prosecutors make up the laws as they go. In other
words, the laws give prosecutors shall vast discretion that they can be
applied in ways that are unfair and even ruinous to companies such as to deny
them basic due process protections (and, of course, the Andersen conviction
was ultimately overturned).

More broadly stated, when language is corrupted so that nothing is clear,
everyone acts potentially at his peril because legal outcomes - that is,
_punitive_ legal outcomes that can harm or destroy lives - rest on the whim of
enforcement authorities who have broad powers to punish based on vague
criteria affording no checks on their power to abuse their discretion. This is
how the author lumps college speech codes with Justice Department abuses and
ties it all back to Orwell's famous piece on language and its uses and abuses.
It is actually a well-written piece, certainly so from a lawyer perspective.

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_delirium
The direction seems backwards to me. Vague criminal laws have had the purpose
and effect he describes for _centuries_. Before the current crop of vague
criminal laws, people used to be brought up on charges like "tending to
undermine the public morals".

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Enra2
I would have been in such deep shit at an american college.

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telemachos
What's next: an article about the War on Christmas (TM) by Bill O'Reilly?

