Legalectric

Remember Todd Guerrero, the attorney at Pig, Dog & Duck, (612) 371-3258, the guy with the “Big Stone II” applications? (That’s him hiding from the camera on the passenger side — from a biodiesel convention’s test drive of a Jeep Liberty!) (no, NOT the one at Reference AudioVisual)

Well today his mother’s in the news! I had the joy of meeting her at Women’s Political Alliance ages ago. She’s an eminently sensible woman who frequents the LTE pages. I’ll never understand genetics. Here’s her editorial:

Ironies at St. Thomas Law School

“Law school can be a torturous experience.”

This was the first sentence of the little article in the Oct. 5 Star Tribune announcing the recognition of St. Thomas Law School as the “Best Quality of Life” among students by the Princeton Review in their new book, “The Best 159 Law Schools.”

The irony of your writer to use the word “torturous” was not lost on some of us working to stop torture of detainees in prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and others around the world where prisoners are “rendered” as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year St. Thomas Law School hired Robert Delahunty as one of their esteemed professors. This is the man who, when working as a lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice helped write the memos to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales justifying torture in “certain circumstances.”

The founding dean of the law school, Patrick Schiltz, made an even more ironical statement to your reporter by saying, “We work hard at stressing not just the law but also the way people treat each other. That was an important part of the philosophy in setting up the school.”

While I have no doubt that St. Thomas is a fine law school, as far as I know, torture is against the law — the Geneva Conventions and the Conventions Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Perhaps the hiring committee did not know this was U.S. law and, also, forgot about the law school’s philosophy in the hiring of Delahunty.

Pat Guerrero, St. Paul.