Legal News

Prof Who Scoffed at 9/11 Victims Wins But Gets Scant Sympathy From Jury

By Jennifer Forsyth

A Denver jury today determined that Ward Churchill, the embattled University of Colorado professor who believed he was retaliated against for an incendiary essay about World Trade Center attack victims, was wrongly terminated.

But if he was hoping to sock it to the university for firing him, he surely left the courtroom disappointed. The Denver jury awarded him just $1 in damages. A judge will decide later whether he gets his job back, reports the AP. Here’s the breaking news story from the Denver Post. The professor had claimed he was fired for exercising his free speech rights; the university had claimed that it was not about his views on Sept. 11 victims but that he had engaged in faulty and dishonest research. The jury today decided his firing was indeed about the contents of his essay.

In the essay, published one day after the attacks but widely disseminated years later, Churchill called those killed in WTC “little Eichmanns,” referring to the Nazi bureaucrat who ran the Holocaust machinery. (Read this previous LB post for the context of this phrase and more information about the trial.)

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 02, 2009 (boomark / email).