Court Spares Yale from Liability for Firing Medical School Professor

We have been distracted by armchair punditry.

Meanwhile, contracts law continues unimpeded.  As Debra Cassens Weiss reports in the ABA Journal, U.S. District Judge Sarah A.L. Merriam issued a forty-six-page opinion last week dismissing Bandy Lee’s claims.  Dr. Lee sued under a Connecticut statute that incorporates constitutional protections from the U.S. and Connecticut Constitutions after Yale fired her from her position as an unpaid volunteer clinical professor for suggesting that Alan Dershowitz (left) and Donald Trump showed symptoms of psychiatric illness caused by contagion.  She had written one book and edited another about the threat to the country posed by Mr. Trump’s mental condition.

According to Dr. Lee, Mr. Trump showed “definitive signs of severe pathology” that created a threat to public safety.  As a professional psychiatrist, she believed she had a duty to warn the public of these matters.  When Professor Dershowitz described his marriage as “perfect” in connection with evidence that he was connected to the sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, Dr. Lee noted that Mr. Trump had described his allegedly coercive phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “perfect.”  Dr. Lee diagnosed Professor Dershowitz (via Twitter, natch) as suffering from a shared psychosis with the former President. The word choice was telling evidence.  Professor Dershowitz was not amused, and he wrote to Yale Law’s Dean to request that Dr. Lee be disciplined.

A Yale review committee found that Dr. Lee had made her comments in her professional rather than a personal capacity and that in so doing she had violated a rule of psychiatry against diagnosing people without meeting them.  Ah, but what if you can’t meet them because they have a contagious mental disorder?  Yale terminated her faculty appointment.

Eugene Volokh provides full coverage over at the Volokh Conspiracy, with detailed excerpts from Judge Merriam’s opinion.  Professor Volokh notes that the ruling is a narrow one.  Judge Merriam found that Dr. Lee, who was an unpaid volunteer, was not an “employee” for the purposes of the Connecticut statute, despite having served in her role at Yale for seventeen years.  Dr. Lee would have had a stronger claim were she a tenure-track employee.

Whew.  I’m glad that I have tenure so that I can offer my completely unprofessional opinion that the real source of the contagion is Rudy Giuliani, shown at right at a superspreader event.