The Media and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Last month I was contacted by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio and interviewed regarding criminal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  A French banker and head of the International Monetary Fund, Strauss-Kahn has been charged with sexually assaulting a maid for the $3000-a- night hotel suite in which he was staying in New York City.  To my surprise, the reporter was not interested in the legal proceedings themselves but rather in the way the case was being presented in the American mass media.

The case is still another example of the way the prosecution of a rich and/or famous person can be and frequently is presented to the public as a type of contemporary morality play, that is, as a dramatic allegory about temptation, sin, and – in the end – either damnation of salvation.  Comparable media packaging of cases involving O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Eliot Spitzer spring to mind.

The added twist in the Strauss-Kahn drama is that the featured player in the morality play is a wealthy and worldly European who found out the hard way about down-to-earth American norms and values.  The best comparison might be to the mass media’s packaging of the attempt to extradite the Polish filmmaker Roman Polansky, who allegedly raped a teenager in California.  Lionized by the French artistic community, Polansky squirreled himself away in Switzerland and in the end avoided the grasp of the American authorities.  Strauss-Kahn, meanwhile is under house arrest in Manhattan and waiting trial.  Might Attica be his hellish fate?

The Il Foglio article appears on the front page of the “Martedo, 24 Maggio 2011” edition, but since the article is in Italian, most of us will require the good services of colleague Irene Calboli in order to read it . . . .

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Unoriginal Thoughts on Appellate Procedure

Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued its decision in State ex rel. Ozanne v. Fitzgerald and State ex rel. Huebsch v. Circuit Court for Dane County.  The decision has rightly generated a good bit of commentary about open government, separation of powers, etc.  My goal here is to clarify a very limited but important point of Wisconsin appellate procedure.

The issues in the decision came to the court in two ways: an appeal from a temporary order that had been certified by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and a petition for a supervisory writ filed by Secretary Huebsch.  The two cases were combined for briefing and oral argument.  The majority’s order denied the certification, granted the petition for a supervisory writ, and then decided the issues contained in the petition for the writ.

In the court’s order, the majority refers to the writ request as a “petition for supervisory/original jurisdiction” (¶ 2) and a “petition for original action” (¶7).  In his concurrence, Justice Prosser refers to the writ request as an “original action” which “satisfies several of the court’s criteria for an original action publici juris” (¶19).

Chief Justice Abrahamson, in her writing, will have none of this (¶¶97-101).  She notes that the majority order “mistakenly asserts” that a “’petition for supervisory/original jurisdiction” was filed by Huebsch “pursuant to Wis. Stat. §§ (Rules) 809.70 and 809.71,” when in fact the Huebsch petition only references 809.71. 

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Do Changes in Benefits for Public Employees Violate the Contracts Clause?

Paul Secunda has a new paper on SSRN that considers under what circumstances statutory changes affecting public-employee benefits might violate constitutional restrictions on the impairment of contracts.  Paul particularly focuses on a very timely case study: Wisconsin’s recent budget-repair bill and its impact on city employees in Milwaukee.  Here is the abstract:

The recent spate of high profile efforts by state governors to roll back public employee pension rights in light of recent budgetary challenges has shone the light directly on the importance to public employees of the Contracts Clause provisions of the federal and state constitutions. Using as an example the controversial budget repair bill in Wisconsin and the application of the bill’s pension provisions to Milwaukee City employee pension rights, this article has sought to show how, under certain specified circumstances, such legislative attempts may be constitutionally impermissible if such laws substantially impair employee contracts with the state without the necessary legal justification.

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