Contrasting Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel and Media Relations Director Sara Kuhl

In December, Laura Dunn, Esquire and four of her clients, all with experiences within Wisconsin as sexual assault survivors, met with Wisconsin’s Attorney General, Brad Schimel, to discuss their concerns about how the UW System is addressing sexual assault complaints. See, UW sexual assault survivors meet with AG, seek meeting with UW system leaders @ Channel 3000.

(One of Ms. Dunn’s clients appearing on camera is from UW-Whitewater; at least one other client of hers, to my knowledge, is also from UW-Whitewater.  That second client gave an audio interview to WISC-TV on 3.19.15, but was not part of the December 2015 video interview.)

Repeatedly, officials at UW-Whitewater and in the UW System have insisted that they cannot speak with the assault survivors who have pending federal Title IX claims against UW-Whitewater (there are now two) or the UW System (there are at least three more against other UW System schools).

This is simply absurd as a matter of law.  Not simply absurd, but manipulatively, mendaciously absurd.  There is no general prohibition whatever, in law or in legal practice, against talking or meeting with adversarial or potentially adversarial claimants.  In fact, these kinds of meetings and discussions happen commonly between opposing sides in all sorts of legal matters.

To believe otherwise, one would have to believe that Brad Schimel, Attorney General of the State of Wisconsin, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law, an accomplished county prosecutor having conducted over one-hundred fifty jury trials, who has chaired the Wisconsin Crime Victim Council and Sexual Assault Response Team, somehow has a weaker grasp of the law than Sara Kuhl, a university public-relations woman and sometime proprietor of 2Kuhl Public Relations.

(Now I’m libertarian, not a Republican, so A.G. Schimel and I would likely disagree over points here and there.  Nonetheless, there is simply no imaginable circumstance in which I would reject Mr. Schimel’s assessment of what’s legally possible for Ms. Kuhl’s view.  In fact, to take the measure of Ms. Kuhl’s position, in her view the request of Laura Dunn, Esq. [University of Maryland Law and Adjunct Professor at that same school] for a meeting is, also, unjustified in legal practice. That’s absurd, too.)

Ignoring these claimants is contrary to conventional legal practice, perpetuates a response of collective silence in the face of individual grievances, and asks the community to reject the views of accomplished, qualified attorneys for the sake of shallow sophistry.