Sara Russo

Lynne Stewart, a lawyer recently indicted in a federal court in New York for allegedly aiding Islamic terrorists, was granted a paid position as a "public interest mentor" at a Stanford University Law School conference. Faced with negative press coverage, Stanford revoked the lawyer's title at the last minute. Despite appearances of an about-face, the University later admitted that only Stewart's title and not her role at the event had been altered. She was permitted to speak at the function and set up private mentoring sessions with students, and her financial agreement with the school was honored.

Titled "Shaking the Foundations: The West Coast Conference on Progressive Lawyering," the law school conference was held on November 8-10 at Stanford, and featured about a dozen panels on left-of-center topics. A panel on "Roe at 30: The Fragile State of Abortion Rights" consisted of the directors of Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, while one titled "Same Sex Adoption: Legal and Personal Perspectives" was manned by an attorney for the Southern California ACLU, among others. Stewart spoke on a conference panel titled "Immigration and Civil Rights After 9/11" and met with students for private "mentoring" sessions afterwards.

The University's original agreement with Stewart called for her to counsel students under the title of David W. Mills Public Interest Mentor and to speak at the law school conference. The controversy over her appearance erupted when Stanford sent out an e-mail on November 5 informing students that Stewart would be appearing on campus as a mentor, and inviting them to attend a lunchtime discussion of the case against Stewart and to sign up for "one-on-one mentoring session[s]" with her.

Opponents of the lawyer's visit circulated several quotes from Stewart around campus, including a statement from a 1995 New York Times article that many read as illustrating her support for terrorism. "I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence," Stewart stated. "That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support."

Students also circulated a more recent quote from a lengthy New York Times profile of Stewart and her legal difficulties. The September 11 terrorist attacks on America were an "armed struggle" like Hiroshima and Dresden, she stated for that article, noting that such conflicts inevitably cause civilian casualties. "I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are placed in a position of having no other way," she said.

Carter Ruml, one of several law school students who led the protest against Stewart's mentorship, explained to Campus Report his reasons for opposing the lawyer's title. "She expressed support for terrorism and she didn't regard the attacks of 9/11 as wrong….so I sent an e-mail that brought Lynne Stewart's statements to the attention of the community. And I said, 'I'm sure there will be disagreement on this, but I don't think we ought to endorse this person, and I don't think it's a partisan issue to regard the death of 3,000 innocent civilians in a terrorist attack as wrong. Somebody who can't recognize that as being wrong should not be a public interest mentor.'"

The charges against Stewart stem from actions she took while representing Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted for helping to orchestrate the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. New York prosecutors allege that Stewart transmitted information from Rahman to his terrorist organization, the Islamic Group, in direct violation of a court order she signed promising not to do just that. Among specific allegations, Stewart is accused of sending out a press release announcing that Rahman no longer supported a cease-fire in Egypt, thereby alerting terrorist cells of his change-of-heart, and of distracting prison guards to allow Rahman to speak privately with an interpreter in Arabic. Stewart admits that she passed on information for the Sheik, but has defended her actions on the grounds that Rahman's constitutional rights were being violated, and denies that she aided terrorists. She has pleaded "not guilty" to the charges brought against her.

"I suppose that the Stanford law school administration, or the administrators of the mentoring program, might have consulted all the evidence and decided that they believe [Stewart] to be innocent," noted UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who publicized Stewart's visit on his website. "But if they haven't so concluded, then isn't it a bit odd to invite her not just as a speaker, but as a mentor-a position that presumably carries with it some endorsement of her character and her legal ethics?" he asked.

According to student Carter Ruml, Stewart's invitation was issued not by Stanford's top-level administrators, but rather by Eduardo Capulong, the director of public interest programs at the school. "He is a communist," Ruml told Campus Report. "And I'm not saying that as a metaphor…he's a member of the International Socialist Organization…if you go to their search engine and you look for articles and you type in 'Eduardo Capulong' you'll see the guy is a correspondent for their newsletter."

"[Stewart] wanted to come to the Bay area to raise money for her legal defense fund from area churches, how ironic is that, and a bunch of other groups," Ruml said, "and I think this might have been a way for the school to pick up the tab for her to travel out here to raise some more money."

Stanford's e-mailed announcement to students about Stewart's visit describes her indictment, but also states that, "Lynne has emphatically declared her innocence." "I hope you'll take advantage of these opportunities to interact with an attorney who's at the center of the day's important issues," the message concludes.

The University's mood quickly changed once Stewart's visit became national news. The Wall Street Journal's online website, OpinionJournal.com, picked up Volokh's website story, and published a similarly critical piece about her mentorship arrangement with the school. "Stanford's action is the equivalent of an American university in 1943 inviting someone who's a Nazi sympathizer and alleged Nazi collaborator to be a 'mentor' for its students. One wonders how long it will be before some university invites Osama bin Laden himself to be a guest speaker," stated the piece.

Outrage on campus about Stewart's mentorship role also became evident. Nearly one fifth of Stanford law school students signed one of two petitions circulated by students Carter Ruml and Elliot Bladen around campus. "It was incredible to look at all the names on that petition. There were 65 names on that petition and there were another two dozen who signed my letter," Ruml told Campus Report. "There are only 500 people in the law school and I feel like we hadn't exhausted the well of support….so that was very heartening."

Two days after the OpinionJournal.com article ran, Stanford Law's dean, Kathleen Sullivan, released a statement announcing that the University was withdrawing the title of "mentor" from Stewart. "The student-sponsored 'Shaking the Foundations' conference being held this weekend is an appropriate forum for Ms. Stewart and others with various points of view to speak on many issues, including the ethical limits of client representation. However, it has come to my attention that Ms. Stewart has expressed sympathy for and tacit endorsement of the use of directed violence to achieve social change," reads the statement. "Therefore I have decided that it is not appropriate to confer the title of David W. Mills Public Interest Mentor to Ms. Stewart, and have today issued a letter to Ms. Stewart rescinding the offer to serve in the capacity of mentor to our students during her visit," it concluded.

Stewart's defenders were incensed by the timing of the University's decision. According to Stewart, Stanford first requested her services as a mentor in early summer, several months after her April indictment on charges of aiding terrorists. Supporters of the lawyer contend that the University acted inappropriately by rescinding her title at the eleventh hour and by notifying her in a disrespectful manner. Stewart did not receive notice that her position had been revoked until after she had checked into her hotel in Palo Alto for the conference and received a fax informing her of the change.

"The dean did not call me up and say, 'Let's come in and talk this over,'" Stewart commented. "I was given a flat out 'get out of town' kind of thing."

Stewart argues that her beliefs should not have rendered her ineligible to serve as a mentor. "George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, a few other people in our history have supported violence to achieve social change," she said. "I feel I'm in that tradition."

Despite her seemingly inhospitable welcome from the University, Stewart was permitted to speak at the conference and to set up one-on-one mentoring sessions with students as had been previously arranged. Defending her actions against charges that she had infringed on Stewart's free speech rights, Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily clarifying that only Stewart's title had been revoked.

"Stewart completed all of her speaking arrangements at the Law School and met with students as scheduled without incident," Sullivan wrote. "The Law School of course has also honored the original financial agreements with Stewart; my letter of Nov. 8 to Stewart rescinded the title of 'mentor' but nothing else about her visit."

"This decision….enabled Stewart to speak her views and be heard by our students, while withholding the Law School's endorsement," Sullivan added.

"They gave her $1,000, in the way of an honorarium," Ruml told Campus Report. "That was very upsetting to me at first…the school took away Stewart's status, so how can they say they don't endorse her but at the same time give her money? It has to do with the fact that she had already traveled out to California by the time the school revoked her mentor status…and by the time she was out here, she'd flown out to California in reliance that she was going to get that money, which gives her a form of contractual claim."

"It was made clear to me by the administration that they gave her the money, not because they wanted to, but because they had to," he added.

Given Stanford's contractual obligations to Stewart, Ruml declares that he is satisfied by the administration's response. "The dean did the right thing. She did more than we thought that she could do," he commented. "We thought she was boxed in by a need to not look as if she was caving to an alleged conservative conspiracy, because the dean is in general a very liberal person. But she did the right thing on this….And she publicly, in that statement, showed that the director of public interest programs was a rogue operative, that she was not affirming his actions."

Despite their reservations about her views, many of the students who had opposed Stewart's mentorship at Stanford turned out to hear her speech. "A lot of people who had been against her having the status of mentor and who do not agree with her views at all and do not admire her in a personal capacity, we made sure to go to her speech. Because we said throughout that we support an open forum, we don't want to censor her," Ruml explained. "It's so easy for the left to characterize it as, 'Oh, you're being book burners, you're being McCarthyists, you're not for free expression,' and we wanted to show, 'No, no, no, key distinction, and it might be hard for you to understand but it's real. Which is the distinction between censorship and the withholding of an endorsement.' And the law school needed to withhold an endorsement, but we don't want to silence Stewart."

"I asked her some questions, and some other people asked her some questions, respectfully but forcefully," Ruml told Campus Report. "She does not repudiate the views that she's been quoted as saying in the media with regards to terrorism, with regards to the United States being bad, and with the same sort of muddle-headed refusal to see clearly that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were wrong. She had an opportunity to expand on her quotes, and clarify the quotes, to say she was misquoted. She didn't make use of that. So she did not distance herself from those views."