Conservancy loss illustrates ongoing impotence of environmental protection right in state constitution

Franklin Park postcard, c. 1930-1945
Boston Public Library, public domain

In the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Wednesday, environmentalists lost their bid to block renovation of a stadium in a Boston park.

I wrote about the case in the lower court at some length in 2024. The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and local residents wanted to stop the road construction and structural overhaul to bring White Stadium in Boston's Franklin Park into service as stadium host of Boston Legacy, a football club in the U.S. National Women's Soccer League. The "Emerald Necklace" is an urban greenway that landscape architect Franklin Law Olmsted planned to encircle Boston and was widely disrupted in the city's 20th century growth.

The court affirmed on various grounds, and two are of interest to me relative to environmental litigation. First, the court held that The Emerald Necklace Conservancy lacked standing to challenge the project as a violation of terms of the trust that supports the existing stadium and park.

This result is not unusual; environmentalist standing has been a challenging plaintiff problem since I studied environmental law decades ago. (Hat tip to Profs. James Boyle & Jonathan Weiner.) But the outcome shows that that's still so. The doctrine of locus standi in the European Union and elsewhere looks like standing in U.S. constitutional law, but is not as prohibitive, and in many jurisdictions—such as Malawi, where I traveled this summer—legislators have enacted workarounds to allow conservation organizations to respond to industry abuses that endanger human welfare.

Second, the court held that the Massachusetts legislature removed the stadium property from park status no later than 1950, thus depriving the plaintiffs of a claim to which they might otherwise be entitled under Amendments Article 97 (Article XCVII) of the Massachusetts Constitution, a conservation measure that voters approved overwhelmingly in 1972.

Article 97 interests me because of its potential breadth. Its first paragraph articulates a powerful affirmative right: "The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment; and the protection of the people in their right to the conservation, development and utilization of the agricultural, mineral, forest, water, air and other natural resources is hereby declared to be a public purpose."

This language dates to the same year, 1972, as the Clean Water Act in federal law, and the likes of article IX of the Montana Constitution, which sustained the youth climate claim in Held v. Montana in 2024. The language weirdly resonates with later constitutional expressions of environmental rights elsewhere in the world, such as South Africa's (article 24). 

Thus far, however, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has interpreted Article 97 narrowly, only in connection with designated park land and only as implemented by the legislature—so hardly a constitutional right at all.

The case is Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Inc. v. City of Boston (Mass. Aug. 19, 2026). Justice Gabrielle R. Wolohojian wrote the unanimous opinion of the court.

Oliver team uses state FOIA in Flock camera probe

Flock camera
Bruxton via Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0

HBO's Last Week Tonight aired a story on August 2 on police surveillance technologies, and it featured the fruits of state freedom-of-information-act (FOIA) requests.

Comedian John Oliver subjected police surveillance technology to his usual gratifying, if NSFW, raking over the coals, surveying the likes and inadequacies of ShotSpotter (purported audio detection of gunshots), Stingray (interception of cell communication), Fusus (live feed-map interfacing), and Flock cameras (tracking by car license plate; recently at Vox). Even for those of us who've worried about these technologies for some years, the show is, as always, worth the watch.

(Vox and The Washington Post published this week on Flock cameras, in paywalled stories. See also NPR coverage of Flock camera vandalism.)

I write about the Last Week coverage here for a collateral point, which is to highlight the use of state FOIA. Abuse of surveillance systems has been revealed in many an investigation by requests for public records, namely, surveillance access logs. 

The Oliver segment related, for example, reports of a suspiciously high incidence of tech and law enforcement personnel viewing surveillance feeds from places such as gyms without any apparent legitimate purpose, not to mention extended surveillance of persons not yet suspected of any specific wrongdoing, with problematic implications in racial profiling.

To investigate for themselves, Oliver's team used the California Public Records Act over the course of three years to interrogate the police department in Rialto, California, over its use of Fusus. Rialto was noteworthy, because the city required new businesses, as a licensing condition, to connect live-feed cameras to the police Fusus network.

In response to a request for police emails mentioning Fusus, the city first said it had none, Oliver reported—

which seemed implausible. So, we filed a much broader request and over the next two years, they sent us 28 pages, which still didn't seem like all the material they probably had. So, last February, we said, f— it, send us an export of your whole log database for Fusus, showing us every time your officers peaked at a privately owned camera. We asked for it as a searchable digital file as the law requires. But instead, what they did was send us a 30,413 page PDF.

Fortunately, HBO, per Last Week, had the resources to convert the PDF to a searchable, digital file. Among the findings, police "access[ed] cameras at the Rialto Days Inn for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool."

I've been working in freedom of information law, especially access law, for more than 30 years, and it's lamentable that the FOIA compliance playbook, especially at the municipal level, hasn't changed. The go-to tools to obstruct access continue to be: 

• simply and outrightly deny that responsive records exist; 
• deter the requester with an outrageous fee demand (if not here); 
• delay, often by under-producing or redacting, to cost the requester time and resources to follow up; and, 
• if ultimately compelled to produce, render records useless through tactics such as over-production and medium or format regression.

Having just concluded a term on the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee, working closely with FOIA officers, I want to be quick to acknowledge that there are countless dedicated public servants working hard to serve requesters honestly and fairly, often at the hazard of facing off with their own supervisors. The same is true at the state and local level, and I don't want to generalize unfairly to denigrate the work and sacrifices of so many. The situation is surely a case of the bad apples that spoil the bushel.

Kudos to HBO and Last Week for their tenacity in shining light on a spoiled bushel.

High court sticks with conventional duty doctrine in relieving contractor of responsibility for roofer's fall

Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort
Jason Morrison via Flickr (edited) CC BY-NC 2.0

A general contractor without boots on the job site owes no duty of care to a subcontractor's employee on site, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held Monday.

The plaintiff was a roofing worker on the job at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, Massachusetts. He sustained serious injuries falling from a roof when between safety-harness clips. 

Worker compensation law precluded the plaintiff from suing his own employer, a subcontractor. But as often happens in such cases, to supplement insufficient compensation from the worker compensation system, the plaintiff looks around for third parties who also might bear responsibility. Here, the plaintiff sued the general contractor for negligence and negligent hiring—or, more precisely, negligent contracting.

The litigation pattern is similar to a case I teach (Lulu, SSRN), first developed for 1L torts by the late Prof. Marshall S. Shapo, to introduce students to litigation patterns more complex than a simple one plaintiff versus one defendant, as well as the collateral implications of legislative policy, such as worker compensation. Like here, in Wrobel v Trapani (Ill. App. Ct. 1970), the plaintiff was a subcontractor employee who sued the general contractor in negligence. Sometimes I fret over the age of some of the cases I rely on to teach 1Ls, but, I suppose, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Though a range of amici lined up on both sides, including the Suffolk Law Supreme Court Clinic for the plaintiff and the American Tort Reform Association for the defense, the instant case was straightforward, and the court's decision a workmanlike affirmance. 

Though the contract between general and sub had broad language about maintaining a safe site, all of the how-to was why the general hired the sub, thus within the sub's almost exclusive purview, the court reasoned. The general contractor had little more authority than to say stop or proceed with the work overall. The sub, and not the general, was involved at the detail level of how long and how many safety lines to have, the sort of stuff that would matter in the plaintiff's suit. So the plaintiff's legal maneuver was an ill-fated effort to subvert the exclusivity of worker comp. 

What's interesting about the case pedagogically is how the SJC framed its decision in terms of duty. The most ethereal of the fundamental elements of tort, duty is where the ghost in the machine gets its say, that is, that judges are permitted to put a thumb in the scale in favor of public policy. And the SJC did. 

"Whether a duty exists is a question of law informed by foreseeability, the relationship of the parties, existing social values, and public policy," the court wrote. Well said; hey, did the court crib my final exam answer key? Because that's an easy six points for the student who remembers.

Applying that standard, beyond the analysis of the facts, the court observed that the legislature frowns on third-party suits that might unfairly undermine worker comp as exclusive remedy. For uncertainty around liability could in turn put a damper on general contracting. The approach is classic economic-conservative, no doubt to the dismay of labor-friendly amici who supported the plaintiff, though not entirely unfairly, if one is suspicious of judicial policymaking.

All the same, the court's reliance on duty is curious in two respects. First, Wrobel v. Trapani was not decided on the basis of duty, rather on the common law doctrine of active-passive indemnity. In Wrobel, the court reached a different conclusion on potential liability in part, but that was because the general contractor in that case did have personnel on site, and the plaintiff alleged directly implicated negligence by one of the general's workers.

The heuristic of active-passive indemnity nevertheless works functionally the same as the court's duty analysis here: the general was not involved, so passive, and the sub was involved, so active, each relative to the alleged negligence. I urge my students to understand active-passive indemnity merely as the sort of hardening of common law logic that occurs through stare decisis when the same fact pattern, here a problem in duty, is presented over and over again in the courts.

Massachusetts does recognize active-passive indemnity, but it is disfavored relative to contractual terms. The instant case exhibits the same disfavor relative to the absence of contractual terms, which might otherwise have spelled out a more specific duty on the part of the general contractor.

Second, the court relies on the Second Restatement to bolster its duty analysis, apparently ignoring the SJC's adoption of the Third Restatement approach to duty, which I wrote about at length more than five years ago and won't unpack again here. Suffice to say the Third Restatement tries to purge policy from the common law duty analysis and might rather have decided the instant case on "scope of liability." That approach, in turn, might more closely reflect the operation of active-passive indemnity.

The dissenters in Doull v. Foster (Mass. 2021), two of five, warned that the Third Restatement approach tried to fix something that wasn't broken and so would not catch on. Their warning seems prescient, as the lower courts have been reluctant to modify their m.o. in duty and causation analysis, and even the SJC has seemed reluctant to double down on rocking the boat.

The instant case is Contento Suquilanda v. Skyway Roofing, Inc. (Mass. Aug. 17, 2026). Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote the unanimous court opinion. A Suffolk Law alumnus, Justice Georges was sworn into the court in December 2020, so did not participate in the opinion in Doull v. Foster, issued in February 2021.

AI breathes life into Theodore Roosevelt at new Library

A Savory Tort Photo Essay

The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened on July 4, in Medora, North Dakota, and I visited last week.

(All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

I'm a Theodore Roosevelt ("TR") fan, politically, socially, and otherwise, and this summer, I've immersed myself in a torrent of books and audiovisual media about the 26th President of the United States and his remarkable life. In the weeks to come, I plan to write more about TR, and North Dakota, with relevance to contemporary life, from U.S. party politics to foreign policy.

I pose with sculptor John Lopez's bronze TR (2017) at the Old Town Hall in Medora, North Dakota.

Meanwhile, I write to share, and to laud, the new TR Presidential Library (Library), especially the artificial intelligence (AI) experience. You might have seen the Library on TV already, as Lee Cowan produced a July package on the opening for CBS Sunday Morning.

The Library itself is a physical marvel. Designed by the global, Oslo-headquartered architectural firm Snøhetta, the earth-toned buildings are melded in sweeping curves into the breathtaking landscape of the North Dakota badlands.  

The Library blends into its landscape.

 

The landscape is part of the visitor experience both outside and inside the Library.

Visitors are encouraged to explore a perimeter boardwalk, where grasslands are being restored, post-construction, and the badlands buttes of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park stretch to the horizon. 

More than mere conveyance, the boardwalk around the Library is a work of exceptional craftsmanship.

Moreover, visitors can switchback their way to the top of the organic green roof of the Library itself.

Visitors summit the Library roof.

The exhibition space features a central hall with rows of displays that, through artifacts and text panels, tell the story of TR's life, from youth to higher education, to North Dakota ranching, New York politics, Washington, the Spanish-American War, the White House, Africa, and the Amazon.

The central hall exhibits are organized chronologically.

In the manner of a presidential library, the subject matter is treated with reverence, but not with total ignorance of controversy or the fallibility of the subject. For example, one display depicts TR's meeting and correspondence with Booker T. Washington, but notes that TR distanced himself from Washington publicly after the meeting went down poorly with Republicans.

Most displayed papers are replicas or on loan, as TR artifacts are collected already at other sites.
Artful exhibits convey authenticity nonetheless; replicas of papers and objects are well made.

On both sides of the hall, large, themed rooms beckon with elaborate sets re-creating periods of TR's life, such as a log cabin in the badlands, or the 1900 Republican convention in Philadelphia.

TR escaped to remote North Dakota amid the grief of losing his (first) wife and mother both on Valentine's Day, 1884.

The themed rooms feature further artifacts and information, as well as experiences for visitors, including the use of AI.

At an activity station, visitors can develop their own campaign posters in the style of the 19-aughts.

A visitor to the Library has the option of having a photograph taken at the Library entrance and carrying a bracelet with an RFID-enabled token to scan at various stations. In one experience, for example, visitors can play President and make decisions about crises the TR Administration faced. One can then see the trade-offs required to satisfy various constituencies, as approval ratings fluctuate in the high-tech choose-your-own-adventure. The Library AI constructs a cumulative record of the visitor's experiences and expressed preferences and generates a summation by email afterward.

Visitors can assess their take on the issues and cast their own votes in the 1912 election.

A recurring delight in the experience vein is a series of stations that use the visitor's likeness to place one in an AI-generated "photograph" in the context of a setting in TR's life. Visitors of all ages, including me, giddily anticipate the images, which appear on a large screen for everyone nearby to see, sometimes eliciting "wow"s, or giggles, and always delight. (Below are my own images from the Library, emailed to me after my visit.)

The crown jewel of the AI system is in the re-created White House Cabinet Room, where a holographic TR (technically, a "life-size interactive avatar") stands behind his desk and answers questions. "TR" invites visitors to come to a lectern in front of the desk, scan their bracelets, and hold down a mic button while asking a question. Along the ceiling above, both visitor and the hologram are captioned for the room.

TR himself answers visitor questions in the White House Cabinet Room.

The AI is good. I mean, very good. Frankly, I expected that the hologram would deliver only truisms and platitudes with the faltering dexterity of an animatronic in the Disney Hall of Presidents.

Not so. This TR was ebullient and on point. He answered questions with surprising depth of knowledge and even what seemed like insight. Even when seconds were required for the AI to formulate a response, the hologram delayed with smooth conversational transitions, such as "Well, let me consider that."

While I was there, one man asked what TR's greatest challenge was as President. That was a softball; TR answered with settlement of the 1902 Coal Strike, a good call. The hologram delivered, though, more than mere encyclopedic recitation, rather an insightful and stirring summary of the experience from the man who was in the room.

A woman then asked whether any of TR's descendants settled in North Dakota. I thought that question might force the AI to dodge. TR did have to "consider" for a few more seconds than for the previous question. He then answered with a capable summary of where his children moved on to, explaining how his family in subsequent generations did fan out across the country. But none, he lamented confidently, followed the old man's tracks back to North Dakota.

A young boy then went up to the lectern—courageously, I thought, with a room full of adults looking on—and eked out a simple question, "Did you like your name?" The hologram bought some time by lauding the question. Then he answered, firmly, no. He then capably explicated his nicknames in life, including "Teedie" as a boy and "Teddy" in politics, and said that he always preferred "Theodore" or "Thee." This hologram has read his David McCullough.

I asked a question, not a hard one, but one I hoped would make the AI earn its keep: "Why do you think you lost the 1912 election?" I made "think" my main verb because I wanted to spur the AI to speculate, not merely orate. I was not disappointed.

To my surprise and delight, the hologram took little time to think and became animated. TR described for the room how, yes, forming the Bull Moose Party had split Republican voters and handed the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. Yet, pounding a fist, TR was adamant that he had done the right thing, standing on principle for the needs of people and against the private interests that had captured the Republican party. (Sound familiar? Then you have a sense of what I hope to write more about soon.)

Inevitably, a person in the room asked TR how he would address political division in America today. Here, the AI was programmed with brakes. TR gave an eloquent answer, a dodge at last, about how it's not his place to second-guess political decision-making in a time so different from his.

But he wasn't finished. Again to my surprise, TR went on to give an impassioned description of political rifts in his own time, and how he addressed them, with salient examples, such as negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Speaking further of the higher calling to exhibit integrity in politics rather than pander to popular sentiments, his answer proved to have contemporary relevance with very little inference required. Or maybe that's just how I heard it.

I was reluctant to leave the room. AI TR was enchanting. 

I met a couple of TR impersonators while I was in Medora. Joe Wiegand's Teddy Roosevelt Show at the Town Square Showhall is superb. (Me with Wiegand's TR at left.) But on those occasions, I was always aware that I was watching and interacting with an actor, however well prepared and gifted for the role.

 

TR (Wiegand) weaved rhetoric into a brilliant portrayal at the Teddy Roosevelt Show.

At the Library, there was no actor. It was easier than I imagined to be seduced by the ghost in the machine. I left the Library feeling like I had some authentic measure of the magnetic charisma that so many of TR's contemporaries described. 

There are some other gems in the Library. There are artifacts from when TR was shot in an assassination attempt. There is a small room dedicated to the dark day when he lost his wife and mother. I don't want to say too much and spoil the adventure. The joy of visiting the Library is discovering these spaces yourself, and imagining yourself in the same historical context—with a little help from AI.

My AI Images from the Library

"Life in TR's New York"
TR was born to privilege but raised with a powerful ethic that wealth entailed an obligation of public service.

"Ranching in the Badlands"
TR sunk more than half of his liquid wealth into ranching in North Dakota. Ultimately he took a massive loss before divesting. But he never regretted the experience, saying it made him who he was, and he would not have been President but for the time he spent in North Dakota.

"Working on the Police Force"
As president of the Police Commission Board, TR walked New York City streets at night with journalist Jacob Riis to uncover and clean up dirty policing.

"Serving in the Navy"
TR did not serve in uniform in the Navy; he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the first-term administration of President William McKinley. Later, as President, Roosevelt deployed "the Great White Fleet," a show of American power and deterrent to aggression, from 1907 to 1909.

"Joining the Rough Riders"
TR resigned his Washington post in 1898 to join the U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, "the Rough Riders," in the Spanish-American War. TR is the only President who has been awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously, for his heroism in Cuba.

"Leading as President"
TR's political opponents in his own party, corporate-friendly Republicans, hoped to sideline him as President McKinley's running mate on the 1900 reelection ticket. To their dismay, TR became President when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. 

My campaign poster, 19-aughts style
TR had pledged not to seek a third term, honoring the example of President Washington. He went on safari in Africa to remove himself from the political fray. But dissatisfied with the performance of his handpicked successor, President William Taft, he threw his hat in the ring for 1912, unsuccessfully.

"Journeying Into the Amazon"
Ever seeking adventure as an antidote to loss, former President Roosevelt joined an expedition in Brazil to chart a river in the Amazon, from 1913 to 1914. Suffering from a leg injury in a portage and from malaria, he very nearly died. Certainly the wear and tear on his health did him no favors. He died at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1919, of pulmonary embolism, at age 60. 

Time has come for permanent DST, but too many legislators prefer to keep Americans in the dark

Google Gemini image CC0

When the clocks turn back to standard time on the first Sunday in November, the sun will set where I live at about quarter before 5 in the evening, and it will set closer and closer to 4 p.m. thereafter.

I'm lucky because I work remotely and get to make my own hours a lot of the time. Still, I feel depression beckon. I often cannot get away from my computer during sunlight hours. There's no time to exercise outdoors, and treadmills are mind-numbing. I gain weight. The sun comes up in the six o'clock hour, but like most people, I have to get my workday going first thing.

My heart breaks to think of people—I once was one—who head off to the office first thing in the morning, an hour-plus commute requiring transit too soon after dawn to have any meaningful personal time in sunlight; who then toil all day in an office with limited windows and violet, artificial light; and who then leave work in darkness. 

And it's not necessary. We squander sunlight in unusable morning hours upon the wildly outmoded notion that we have to get our farming done before the heat of the day.

New England state legislators perennially debate shifting wholly to Atlantic Time, GMT -4, a subterfuge to accomplish permanent daylight savings time without defying federal law. Maine has been most eager for the measure; the sun sets in the 3 p.m. hour in the Bangor winter. But no one state wants to be the first to pull the trigger, an economic collective-action problem.

Congress perennially debates permanent daylight savings time. The House recently passed the bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act. History suggests the bill will fail in the less democratically representative Senate.

Nevertheless, today I sent the following letter to my Rhode Island senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse.

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Letter to Senators Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)

Dear Senators:

I would like to see you support permanent daylight savings time.

I am not an RI native, but in my 15 years here, I have seen, for myself and others, that a full hour of darkness, thus the full termination of twilight, at the time one finishes weekday work is an engine of depression. New Englanders working inside don't see the sun for five days a week.

The testimony of healthcare professionals that standard time is somehow best for "circadian rhythms" is ludicrous, and, I can only imagine, motivated by murky commercial interests I cannot perceive. The House rightly rejected these arguments.

Time zones are based on longitude,* Greenwich, which is arbitrary. The medical claim seems to be based on the idea of workers having to rise before the sun, which happens regardless, and meanwhile ignores the problem on the evening end. How is NO sunlight during waking hours possibly the better option for human health?

If there's a healthcare problem you want to address, let's start with food and shelter for all persons, or compulsory vacation and family leave comparable to Europe, or a shorter work week, freedom from 24/7 responsiveness, efficient public transit, and living wages. Rising before or after the sun is meaningless in comparison.

At minimum, the states should be free to decide. You must know that already there is a New England state pact in the works to move the region to Atlantic Time so as to subvert the federal scheme. The plan never gets going, because no state wants to be the one that pulls the trigger. But subterfuge should not be required anyway.

It's easy now, in summertime, to buy into the weak arguments against permanent DST. If the Senate cannot pass the House bill, I would like you to have a press conference at 5 p.m. on the first Monday in November. In the dark. Then you can explain to constituents why Congress made an arbitrary choice that they don't deserve to see their families in sunlight until the weekend.

Sincerely,
R.J. Peltz-Steele

* Word corrected from my typo in original. 

Workplace mobbing researchers convene in Niagara

The Third Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing opened today, and I was privileged to participate in the opening session.

I've been likewise privileged to be part of the leadership team of this conference, though all recognition for the heavy lifting must go to fearless chair Professor Qingli Meng and legendary sociologist Ken Westhues. As host-Niagara University President Father James Maher recounted in his opening remarks, the progress since our inaugural conference is astonishing, including the founding of the World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing (WARWM) and the Journal on Workplace Mobbing.

 

(UPDATE, July 29, 2026: Conference videos are now posted on the WARWM YouTube channel.)  

 

Baron Nigel Biggar (2023)
Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons
(2023), CC BY-SA 4.0

This morning's opening featured greetings, besides Father Maher's, from Nigel Biggar, an academic and member of the U.K. House of Lords (read more at, e.g., the Hoover Institution); Constanza Ceruti, University of Salta, Argentina; and John Mueller, University of Calgary, Canada.

 

I paste below the Niagara University press release on the third annual conference. The impressive conference program includes these multi-national presenters and subjects:

• Linda Shallcross & Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing Australia and Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing Australia, When Organisations Perpetuate Workplace Mobbing: Race, Gender, and Institutional Responsibility
• Linda Shallcross & Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing and Organizational Response: Why Escalation Persists
• Qingli Meng, Niagara University, Institutionalized Mobbing and the Mobility of Power: Leadership Networks, Culture Transfer, and Accountability in Higher Education
• Lindsey Brown, Rochester City School District, Open Secrets: Inaccessible Texts as Roadmaps to Mobbing
• Catherine Koverola, licensed psychologist, When Workplace Mobbing and Moral Injury Co-occur: A Path Forward
• AnnMarie Flynn, independent scholar, Academic Mobbing as It Unfolds for Targets: An Inflection-Point Model of Psychological Injury
• Tamara Thermitus, McGill University and Toronto Metropolitan University Diversity Institute, When Silence Becomes Violence: Institutional Silencing of Black Women in Leadership
• Heliana Ramirez, Workplace Trauma Recovery, LLC, M.O.M. (Mobbing on Maternity) Leave: Impacts of Mobbing on Pregnant Workers and Their Babies
• Jocelynne Scutt, University of New South Wales, Mobbing "the Mob": When Workplace Dynamics Promote Mobbing Power
• Roselle Aranha, Niagara University, Ethical Leadership and Systems Thinking as Safeguards Against Workplace Mobbing in Higher Education: Lessons from Faculty Development and Appointment Processes
• Deitra Payne, Fabulous Coaching, Training, and Productions, LLC, From Silence to Safety: Human Resource Strategies for Preventing and Addressing Workplace Mobbing
• Cevat Celep, Girne American University, Mobbing Directed at Teachers in Türkiye
• Linda Crockett, Canadian Institute of Workplace Bullying Resources, Working With All Parties Without Excusing Harm: A Trauma-Informed Accountability Pathway for Mobbing
• Steve Fellner, SUNY Brockport, Academic Mobbing and the Fragmented Memoir
• Mariya E. Ivanova, Trakia University, From Experience to Analysis: Workplace Mobbing as a Systemic Phenomenon: Structural Amplification, Triggers, and Recovery
• Gisèle Yasmeen, McGill University, Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished: Whistleblowing and Workplace Mobbing in Publicly Funded and Regulated Institutions
• Maritza Reyes (at The Savory Tort), attorney and independent scholar, Qualifying Workplace Mobbing for Expert Testimony in U.S. Federal Courts
• Sandra Kouritzin, University of Manitoba, Civility as Governance: Linguistic Regimes of Credibility and Exclusion in Higher Education
• Paul Siskind, New York Healthy Workplace Advocates, Workplace Bullying and Mobbing: Legal Basics and Legislative Challenges
• Peter Coughlin, EconPolicy Research Group (Maputo, Mozambique), Canadian Credit Unions’ Vulnerability to Capture by Administrators and Directors: Remedies for Mobbing and Other Takeover Tactics
• Martin Sawma, Edwin Mellen University, Extending Conceptual Analysis of Reflective Motives to Causal Motivations
• Peter Wylie, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Workplace Mobbing Victims Beware: Why Your Union Will Side With the Mobbers and Not You
• Paul Siskind and Mike Schlicht, New York Healthy Workplace Advocates; Qingli Meng, Niagara University; and Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo, Addressing Workplace Bullying and Mobbing Through Legislation
• George Perry, independent writer; Dave Scott-Thomas, coach and independent writer; Jonah Arnold, Health Law Firm; Christine Marie, independent writer; Michael Capiraso, independent writer, Media Coverage Transforms Workplace Mobbing Into Full-blown Cancellations
• Janet Glover-Kerkvliet, Kerkvliet Counseling Associates LLC; and Sonja Pitts, Reign Consulting Group LLC, From Crisis to Coordination: Toward a National Network for Workplace Mobbing Target Survivors

Auditorium at Niagara University this morning

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Niagara University Press Release

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY HOSTS THE 3RD ANNUAL NIAGARA CONFERENCE ON WORKPLACE MOBBING

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, N.Y. — Organized in partnership with the World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing (WARWM), Niagara University is hosting the 3rd annual Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing (NCWM) on July 20–22, 2026 (in-person and virtual).

Workplace mobbing is a subtle social process in which an employee from multiple levels of positions in an organization becomes the target of a systematic, persistent, and collaborated campaign of collective aggressions in the workplace, with the goal of eliminating the person out of the organization meanwhile destroying their identity. Workplace mobbing differs from ordinary workplace conflict. It is a social process in which multiple actors participate directly or indirectly in ways of psychological attack against the targeting, with a predetermined goal of eradication.

By supporting the scholarly study of workplace mobbing as a distinct academic discipline, Niagara University is becoming a significantly recognized hub for research, scholarship, and global dialogue on workplace mobbing.

The workplace mobbing initiative aims to establish an academic framework for understanding, researching, and preventing workplace mobbing, distinct from general bullying. It also aims to publish research and influence policy, moving toward treating workplace mobbing as a recognized, serious form of systemic psychological violence.

The efforts have led to the creation of the Journal of Workplace Mobbing, the first ever refereed and peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated exclusively to the topic. Its inaugural issue (2025) includes multiple articles originating from the 2024 NCWM at Niagara University. This journal–conference pipeline further cements Niagara University’s role in shaping this field. The second issue is ready to publish.

The initiatives also bring together experts globally, notably Dr. Kenneth Westhues from the University of Waterloo, Canada, "the world's most renowned expert on mobbing in higher education" (The Swiss magazine Republik), "the world’s leading authority on academic mobbing" (Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars).

Niagara University welcomes scholars, professional experts, practitioners, and students to join us as we work together to advance the science of workplace mobbing.

About Niagara University. Founded in 1856, Niagara University is a Catholic and Vincentian institution dedicated to educating the whole person through a values-based education rooted  in justice, service, and compassion. For media inquiries, please contact: Alaina Jonathan, Asst. Director of Communications, phone (716) 946-2110, email ajonathan@niagara.edu.

French law students embrace common law; Le Havre confronts modern environmentalism, slave history

Le Havre, France

Our cultural and legal understanding of reputation and privacy are among the countless features of the social contract undergoing rapid evolution in the Trump political era, in Europe as well as the United States.

(All images by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with no claim to underlying content.) 

Once a fringe area of tort law to which most new lawyers had no exposure at all in law school, defamation and privacy have taken center stage in society, in part thanks to their weaponization in polarized politics and popular culture. Hulk Hogan famously shut down Gawker with a multi-pronged privacy suit masking a billionaire's vendetta (Holiday). Melania Trump sued a blogger and the Daily Mail for falsely claiming she worked as a high-end escort (DiBenedetto). And Donald Trump, well, Donald Trump... inter alia, won a fee award and suffered a massive loss, not over sexual relationships as much as deceptions that ensued.

Faculty of International Affairs, University of Le Havre

Last week, I had the great privilege to teach a one-credit course on American litigation over defamation and privacy to undergraduate law students at the University of Le Havre in the Normandy region of France. You can check out the course and course materials at the blogspot, Litigating Reputation in America. I'll leave the downloadable documents in place for the duration of summer 2026 (Perma.cc for later review).

"Litigating Reputation in America" course site

I centered the class on the fascinating transnational defamation civil suit that French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron are prosecuting in Delaware against American podcaster Candace Owens. The case arises from a host of Owens's sensationalist assertions, especially that Brigitte Macron was born a man. A hearing on a motion to dismiss, on jurisdictional grounds only, is scheduled for June 22.

Notwithstanding the seemingly readily disprovable falsity and outrageousness of the assertions at issue, the Macrons face an uphill battle in U.S. courts. Kalshi thinks they'll win (63.7% presently). But the smart money in American defamation litigation is never on the plaintiff. Cf. Tucker Carlson's successful defense against Karen McDougal on grounds, more or less, that no one takes Carlson seriously, so his outrageous assertions could have done no harm.

Meanwhile, in January, a French criminal court convicted 10 defendants of cyberbullying Brigitte Macron with the born-a-man claim (CNS). The contrast between an uphill civil suit in the States and criminal prosecutions in Paris fairly indicates a profound divergence in how social, economic, and political cultures in the United States and Europe, especially in France, respectively value reputation and free speech, and how law and process accordingly balance the two.

In an intensive 15 classroom hours, 24 Le Havre students learned the fundamentals of defamation and privacy torts and engaged with 11 contemporary, ripped-from-the-reporter case studies I prepared for them. The students explored the development of defamation and privacy litigation from client counseling to discovery and dispositive motions, alongside key rules of civil procedure. They argued Rule 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss and negotiated settlements, then rounded out the week with a two-hour final exam.

Civil-law law books, including obligations, at La Galerne Bookstore, Le Havre

I've been teaching American law modules to English-as-a-second-language law students in Europe for 20 years, and never have I seen students perform so well. They embraced the rough-and-tumble of the American adversarial model, while remaining sensitive to issues of professionalism and public policy. True to European thinking, they evinced skepticism of corporate-protective defense doctrines and absolutist free speech claims. They readily adapted their civil-law-trained thinking to precedent-driven common law and analogical argument.

It happened that the well circulated American news story dropped while I was in France, as Futurism put it, "College Professors Say Incoming Students No Longer Understand Middle School Math and Science." I commented on some of my friend chats that the same surely is true for English and arts; it's just harder to quantify.

When I started teaching legal writing in the late 1990s, the challenge was to get students to pay attention to their choices of subjects and verbs. Now many students don't even know what I mean when I say "subject" and "verb." An aside: Shout out to my own relentless K12 grammar instructors: Sharon Reuwer, who in elementary school literally hit me on the head with a book—you could do that back then—until I got my sentence diagramming right; and to Dr. Barbara Dezmon, who in middle school initiated me in language as forensic art, more than mere mechanics.

So as my undergraduate French students dissected their case studies, synthesizing argument from facts and points of law, I could not help but observe, and wonder why, they delivered work product more adeptly than I can expect from most first-year graduate students in the United States. That's not to impugn my home students' potential, nor to generalize unfairly, nor to disrespect those who put in the work and rise to the occasion, but only to fear that too many Americans are inexcusably ill served by their K16 preparation.

Haropa Port offices, Le Havre

I am deeply indebted to the organizing and teaching faculty of the Le Havre program. Professor Baptiste Allard is the driving force behind the program at the University of Le Havre Faculty of International Affairs, along with his Le Havre collegaue, Professor Pierre Capelle. The students are now in week two of the four-week program, in a comparative study of constitutional and administrative law with Professor Akram Faizer of the Duncan School of Law at Lincoln Memorial University.

In the coming weeks, the French students will further explore American law and legal skills with Professor Christine E. Cerniglia, director of clinical and experiential legal education at Stetson Law, and Professor Melanie Reid, associate dean of faculty at the Duncan School of Law. Professors Cerniglia and Reid aim to develop an ongoing relationship with Le Havre that will see American students participating, too, to exchange learning with their French counterparts.

Catène de containers (2017),
a prominent contemporary sculpture by Vincent Ganivet;
behind: post-war apartments in the brutalist architectural style of Auguste Perret

I had some time in Le Havre for tourism, which afforded me the opportunity to explore some scholarly interests in areas including environmental law and the legal history of human rights and the transatlantic slave trade.

Professor Allard is my partner on the environmental law team of the Global Law Classroom, a project born of Professor Reid's ingenuity. I have learned volumes from Professor Allard about the role of global shipping and sea transportation in global environmental law and climate change. Admittedly, there are times when the ins and outs of EU shipping regulations make my eyelids droop. But in Le Havre, I took a boat tour of Haropa Port, and what I saw there charged the subject with a new vitality for me.

Entrance to Port of Le Havre

I've seen many commercial ports in the world, but never so close, gliding on a small passenger boat through an intracoastal waterway alongside massive tankers and container ships. The Port of Le Havre is the largest container port in France, with three terminals, and also receives world-class cruise liners. Oil is the port's number one cargo commodity, implicating the port in contemporary geopolitics. Seeing the scale of the operation, it's impossible not to wonder at humanity's ability to transform a natural landscape to commercial ends, and also to be fretful over environmental risks and consequences.

Kriti Journey, a crude oil tranker, flagged Marshall Islands

Hafnia Nanjing, an oil and chemical tanker, flagged Singapore

 

Container loading

Almost as intriguing as the physical operations of the port are its works in communications and public relations. The boat tour I took and the port's public exhibition center are awash with boastful facts. There also are brochures and special exhibition days that feature recent and upcoming green initiatives at the port. That's good, of course. Yet for the touristic observer such as me, even unusually informed as I am, it's impossible casually to disentangle fact and propaganda, much less to interrogate the presentation for greenwashing.

Vole au Vent, a heavy-lift, self-elevating, jack-up installation vessel, flagged Luxembourg,
loading locally manufactured wind turbines for off-shore destinations

A register of slave transactions,
Maison de l'armateur

The Port of Le Havre also figures in the history of slavery. People from Africa were trafficked through Le Havre, part of the triangular route, to French colonies in the Americas. Le Havre was the imputed port of origin for more than 450 slave voyages trafficking at least 142,341 persons from 1571 to 1848, according to data at Slave Voyages

Maison de l'armateur

. A memorial plaque in "the slave streets of Le Havre" remembers 90,000 trafficked persons. Either way, incredibly, Le Havre was only the third largest slave port in France, where an estimated 1.38 million people were embarked for enslavement.

"Closet" celebrating accomplished
free persons of color,
Maison de l'armateur

The Le Havre Ship Owner's House, or Maison de l'armateur, is a preserved 18th century residence that showcases the opulent lifestyle of the successful merchant of the time. That lifestyle was built on a range of commodities, slavery included. Yet Africans who passed through Le Havre, including those who remained and were enslaved before definitive abolition in France in 1848, were omitted from patriotic historical narratives—whitewashing.

Socially and legally, modern France has dedicated itself peculiarly, present populist inclinations notwithstanding, to memory initiatives, that is, the compulsory remembrance of historical wrongs. The criminalization of Holocaust denial is probably the most often cited example of "French memory laws." But brutal colonialism and the slave trade figure in too.

Accordingly seeking to balance its presentation, the Ship Owner's House presently features a fascinating tandem exhibition, Reminiscences: Phantoms of Slavery (May 8 to Sept. 20, 2026). The exhibition is not set aside in a single space, the usual museum M.O.; rather, the African story is told right alongside the ordinary exhibition with the juxtaposition of radically differently themed art and information. The juxtaposition is often clever, for example, haunting the vestibule of a genteel bedroom with an amber glow behind silhouettes of African celebrants.

Émile Loubon, Le Port du Havre au XIXe siècle (1843),
with museum tags showing offloaded goods

Diorama depicting post-colonial reparations rally, Maison de l'armateur

Acerbic art characterizing a black stain on whitewashed history, Maison de l'armateur

There's plenty in Le Havre to stimulate the mind, not to mention the palate, of the law student and law professor. I hope the students who endured my lessons got something worthwhile from the week, if I dare not hope they learned as much as I did.

I offer my sincere gratitude to the students and staff at Le Havre, to Professors Allard and Capelle, as well as Professor Allard's husband for his hospitality, and to Professors Cerniglia, Faizer, and Reid, as well as Professor Cerniglia's partner, for their generous friendship and collegiality.

Jusqu’au Bout du Monde (2018) by Fabien Mérelle, Port of Le Havre; St. Joseph's Church, behind