The University of Oregon will pay $193,000 to lawyers representing a conservative professor blocked by the university on Twitter for saying “all men are created equal.”
The money will be paid to the Institute for Free Speech and the Angus Lee Law Firm, which represented Professor Bruce Gilley.
The University of Oregon has already paid its own lawyers half a million dollars to defend against Professor Gilley’s First Amendment lawsuit.
The $193,000 payment is part of a legal settlement with Professor Gilley. As part of the settlement, the university will also change its social media rules and provide First Amendment training to its staff.
Gilley teaches political science at Portland State University. In 2022, he was blocked by the communications manager of the University of Oregon Equity account after he replied to her “racism interrupter” prompt with the quote “all men are created equal.” In response, his attorneys brought a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court.
The substantial amount of attorneys fees reflects the fact that Gilley’s lawyers had to take their fight all the way to the federal appeals court in San Francisco, because they had to appeal the trial judge’s denial of their request for a preliminary injunction. The appeals court ruled in favor of Professor Gilley. Litigating the case at both the trial and appellate levels took a lot of time. Attorneys fees tend to be based on the amount of hours lawyers spend on a case and their degree of actual or potential success.
“This fee award reflects the substantial resources required to vindicate fundamental constitutional rights in the digital age, as well as the vigor with which the University of Oregon chose to defend unconstitutional policies,” notes Institute for Free Speech Senior Attorney Del Kolde. “The university made a costly decision to prioritize DEI principles over constitutional principles, aggressively litigating this case for nearly three years rather than acknowledging the obvious—that blocking someone for quoting the Declaration of Independence violates the First Amendment.”
“Oregon taxpayers and UO alumni should question why university officials spent such enormous sums defending the indefensible, especially when the university ultimately agreed to the very reforms Professor Gilley had sought from the beginning,” notes attorney Angus Lee.
Gilley has been attacked by left-leaning academia for a 2017 paper titled “The Case for Colonialism.” As Liam Bissainthe has noted, “colonialism made much of the world more stable, prosperous, and free“:
Being colonized by Western countries benefited much of the world. Third World countries that were not colonized are usually less economically advanced than those that were colonized, as the father of modern Liberia, William Tubman, noted. Tubman, who served as Liberia’s president from 1944 to 1971, observed that Liberia was economically poorer than its neighbors because it had not had “the benefits of colonization.” Ethiopia, which was never colonized, is poorer than most African countries that were, and less free, recently suffering at least 600,000 deaths in the bloodiest war of the 21st Century. Colonization of Third World countries usually made them more agriculturally and economically productive, eventually curbed the practice of slavery, and led to the abolition of barbaric practices like suttee (the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre).
Through colonization, Western countries exported stable, innovative forms of government to the Third World, including democracy, individual rights, government accountability, and separation of powers between different branches of government. The governmental-stability benefits are described in a recent study in Kyklos, the International Review for Social Sciences, by economist Trung Vu.
