A long article in New York magazine about Lawrence Lessig’s participation in a lawsuit against the American Boychoir School. A teacher at the school molested boys during the 1970s and Lessig, a former head boy at the school, was one of the victims. He’s now arguing the case in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court. The crux of the lawsuit is whether the school can be held responsible for the actions of its abusive employees. (They’ve settled cases in the past.) I remember seeing the American Boychoir tour bus around Princeton quite regularly. The place is is just down the road from campus. The school is arguing that it is in no more responsible for the actions of the abusers it employed than it would be for employee “stopping in a bar after work and slugging someone in the mouth. ‘Is the company responsible?’ [the school’s lawyer] asks. ‘No. Why not? Because they’re not acting within the scope of employment.’” That seems like a weak analogy. In this case the employee was in a position to repeatedly abuse his victims in virtue of his role and the authority it carried. The school’s defence seems to come perilously close to arguing that it can’t be held responsible for any illegal action that a teacher perpetrated on a pupil, because of course illegal actions are not within the scope of the teacher’s employment.

I don’t know about the legal merits, of course, but on the basis of their past experiences, together with the evasions and blame-the-victim insinuations from the school’s President and its chief lawyer, it’s easy to see how the litigants’ could have a desire to raze the institution to the ground.