Marta Sanchez, a law student at the University of Virginia, has filed a lawsuit against her law professor, Kenneth Abraham, claiming he committed assault and battery. She's seeking $35,000 - $25,000 in compensatory damages and $10,000 in punitive damages.
What happened is that professor Abraham touched Sanchez on the shoulder while demonstrating the legal principle known as the "eggshell skull rule." Abraham describes the touch as a "tap." Sanchez says it was more like a "caress" - and something that caused her to summon up memories of a rape, pregnancy and abortion she'd suffered in her native Panama.
Ironically, Ms. Sanchez's unexpected reaction is a perfect illustration of what the eggshell skull rule is all about. The rule says if a court determines that a wrongful act has transpired, the defendant is liable for the damage caused by the act, even if the damage is bigger than typically predictable.
Sanchez's lawyer, Steven Rosenfield, explains: "She brought a lot of baggage with her. She had been terrorized and victimized as a child, and although we don't hold Abraham responsible for what happened to her as a child, what he did is exacerbate and bring to the surface once again her vulnerability to men with authority and power."
SCARY PREMISE
Anne Coughlin, a colleague of Abraham at the law school and a specialist in criminal procedure and feminist theory, points to the downside of Sanchez's case: "Given the stuff I teach, this scares me out of my wits. I have to talk about issues that are much more explosive than a torts suit. I teach rape and police brutality and you name it. The thought that you'd have to so carefully police yourself in the classroom that a misspoken word might generate not just a student coming up to you after class but a lawsuit is really troubling."
Coughlin is not being paranoid. Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, for instance, after being sued by students who didn't like the way he taught sexual harassment law, says he will no longer teach a class without a tape recorder running in the front of the room.
Attempting to bring a bit of common sense to the issue, professor David Hanson at Virginia Western Community College asks the following questions:
"Should professor Abraham have asked for a volunteer, or asked Sanchez for permission to tap her on the shoulder in his demonstration⢠Perhaps, in the perfect clarity of hindsight. But was it reasonable for Abraham to presume that such a courtesy (or precaution) would have been necessary⢠How could Abraham have possibly imagined such a reaction?"
And what about Sanchez⢠"Many years ago, my wife was a young teacher in a school in Indiana, where the principal was at times annoyingly friendly toward her," says Hanson. "She asked him to stop, and he did, with an apology. Maybe he meant well, maybe not. But in any case, that was the end of it. No sexual harassment complaint, no lawsuit, no big deal."
Asks Hanson: "Could not Sanchez have simply raised her hand in the universally recognizable 'stop' gesture and said, 'Please use someone else to make your point'?"
And more than a decade ago, could not have Anita Hill simply raised her hand and told Clarence Thomas to quit telling dirty jokes?
ANTI-FEMINIST
Feminist author Camille Paglia summed it up this way, writing a week after the tense climax of the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings into Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court: "If Anita Hill was thrown for a loop by sexual banter, that's her problem. If by the age of 26, as a graduate of Yale Law School, she could find no convincing way to signal her displeasure and disinterest, that's her deficiency. We cannot rely on rigid rules and regulations to structure everything in our lives."
It is, wrote Paglia, anti-feminist to play the victim card as a first resort, anti-feminist to not take the personal responsibility to define what will and will not be tolerated, anti-liberation to frivolously claim damage over every annoying thing that comes along:
"Anita Hill is no feminist heroine. The sexual revolution of my Sixties generation broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected respectable ladies. We demanded an end to the double standard. What troubles me now is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers."
It was a few years after the public spectacle of the Thomas hearings that the FBI paid a visit to columnist Charles Krauthammer to ask if a man whom he had worked beside for two years had ever told a sexist or racist joke. That's when he realized, says Krauthammer, that "insensitive speech had achieved official status as a thought crime."
Shortly thereafter, Bernice Harris, 58, a lunch cashier in the U.S. Senate cafeteria, was charged with harassment for calling her customers "honey" and "sugar." Being called "baby," complained Christopher Held, an employee in Sen. Mitch McConnell's office, was "real bothersome."
What's more bothersome, of course, is that we've slipped to the point where "honey" is a crime and Dershowitz has to carry a tape recorder to class.
