Maybe the dual titles are a lousy attempt at humor–but as I often tell my clients, the jokes are for me, the rest is for you.
Yesterday, the news broke that the Circuit Court for Albemarle County had set aside portions of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s civil investigative demand, which sought certain information related to research grants obtained by former UVa professor Michael Mann.
My dual titles are only slightly exaggerated. At the end of the day, this is not going to go down in history as a major event in Virginia legal or scientific circles, but you would never know that based on the jubilation from the Mann camp.
General Cuccinelli is now allowed to go back to the drawing board, if he wishes, and draft up some new CIDs in line with the directives the Court gave him. Or, if he has reason to believe that there has been a violation of the VFATA, he could just file a lawsuit and go about getting the same information through discovery–as I have said before and said again, it is usually a waste of time to fight civil investigative demands.
In fact, this opinion will probably be remembered by the legal and scientific communities, if it is remembered at all, for its recitation of some clear black letter law: namely, that scientific researchers working on state funded grants are not immune from prosecution under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
Now, that is hardly a revolutionary proposition, but it is always nice to see Courts embrace a correct read of the law, especially when addressing a subject for the first time. If I were a gambling man, I would also bet that a statement like that is not what Michael Mann et al. had in mind when they challenged this CID.
I haven’t seen the opinion posted anywhere, but I will track it down eventually.
