> I was against the trolling in Clinton's personal life for consensual
> sexual relations and thought they should have been out of bounds for
> discovery even in court proceedings, since private non-public
> consensual sex had nothing to do with sexual harassment charges by
> Paula Jones. (Publicly flaunted sex on the job is another matter that
> could have legal implications but Clinton, however reckless, did not
> engage in that.)
-and that that Caldwell is wrong, since Nathan usually knows what he's -talking about when it comes to legal issues, and Caldwell often doesn't. -But I await enlightenment from the Left Barrister Observer corps.
I was making a normative statement not a legal evaluation. I'd have to check the details of the Violence Against Women Act for whether it applied in this case, although the whole irony of a moderately pro-feminist President being hung on those laws is valid in general. Obviously, since Jones was allowed to take a deposition from Clinton about Lewinsky, it was legal for him to be forced to talk about his sexual history. Although the judge ultimately ruled that the information was not relevant to the lawsuit.
This does raise the very dangerous use of lawsuits to force the disclosure of personal information through private lawsuits, even when the plaintiff knows the lawsuit is a loser, as part of a broader movement to embarass and attack a target. If combined with those with power in parts of the government, this is a danger on the scale of McCarthyism if not more so, since you have no right to remain silent in private lawsuits.
The example I gave during the Clinton investigation was to imagine J. Edgar Hoover back in the 1960s sitting on his tapes of MLK screwing white women. He couldn't legally leak the tapes but imagine if he encouraged rightwing allies to instigate a sexual harassment lawsuit againt MLK. Then on the stand, MLK is asked, "have you ever had an adulterous affair with a white woman." He has to answer. If he tells the truth, he may have his moral leadership destroyed and open himself to attack by black militants. If he lies, then Hoover may have a legal excuse to brush off his tapes and charge MLK with perjury and throw him in jail.
Turning civil lawsuit lies into grounds for criminal perjury is a recipe for opening a whole front of police state repression. Too many people have embarassing personal secrets where police state use of private lawsuits will just be used for waves of criminal indictments when needed for repression.
-- Nathan Newman