The high court recognized that even though the mere prosecution of Arthur Andersen brought about its downfall

This rests on two very misguided notions: (1) that federal guidelines for workplace discrimination by Rosetta Stone Store employers are applicable, in their entirety, to college and university students and faculty, and (2) that the words of students and faculty can be considered harassment and equated, essentially, with physical misconduct. With that rationale, administrators assert that if they do not act on allegations of verbal harassment or discrimination, they could lose federal funds under provisions of Title IX. This couldnt be further from the truth. Well-established Supreme Court jurisprudence makes clear that campuses of higher education must have a much higher deference for First Amendment freedoms than is the case in workplace environments. Nonetheless, this thinking pervades the risk-averse mindset of American higher education. As federal guidelines shape speech restrictions, a related trendthat of campus groupthink spreading to the real worldhas developed. It goes without saying that tomorrows leaders are molded on todays campuses, so it should come as no surprise that political leaders, many of whom were educated in the 1980s when speech codes began to become all the rage, show little compunction about enacting and enforcing dangerously malleable laws. Perhaps this explains the current disrepute into which the idea of clarity of legal requirements, an important aspect of due process of law, has fallen: Students have been taught by example that precision of language is best to be avoided. Vagueness, after all, can serve a number of Rosetta Stone V3 purposesnone of them salutary.The demise of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm is one of the clearest examples of prosecutors twisting vague federal obstruction of justice statutes to achieve their ends well before the case had closed. The government believed that the Andersen firm enabled its client, Enron Corporation, to report financial transactions in a way that would incorrectly inflate earnings. In a case where reasonable and intelligent accountants might differ over the correct treatment and reporting of a transaction, the government nonetheless viewed Andersens conduct as intentional criminal activity. But the Department of Justice did not prosecute Andersen for certifying Enrons financial statements. Rather, Andersen was prosecuted for following its own routine procedures for handling internal documents. This was because a raft of federal obstruction of justice statutes makes it very dangerous for accountants to operate normally; in the Andersen case, the firm stumbled when it proceeded to obey its own long-standing and unremarkable (and, indeed, quite widespread) policy governing the destruction of old and obsolete documents generated during the course of a client audit. The Andersen firm, in other words, got indicted and convicted even though it acted in a manner common for the industry and seemingly not in violation of any discernable law.So it was that one of the Big Five national accounting firms collapsed without so much as Rosetta Stone Spain Spanish an adjudication that it had illegally destroyed documents, much less that it had helped its client cook the books. In June 2005, after Andersen had been destroyed by the indictment and conviction, the Supreme Court unanimously knocked down the feds use of vague obstruction charges to prosecute the giant accounting firm. The high court recognized that even though the mere prosecution of Arthur Andersen brought about its downfall, no criminal conduct had taken place. But it was too late to save the firm; it had been intentionally destroyed by the Department of Justice in order to prevent the firm from testifying at the criminal trials of Enron officers and providing them with a defense of reliance upon the reasonable professional advice of the companys auditors. KPMG, another large accounting firm, having learned the lesson of the Arthur Andersen debacle, admitted wrongdoing (regarding tax shelters developed and sold by the firms client) in an attempt to ensure that the mere charges that had destroyed Arthur Andersen wouldnt be levied against KPMG as a firm. In all of this, the matter of factual truth played a decidedly secondary role.For the Justice Department, the ruins of Arthur Andersen Rosetta Stone served as instruction: Rather than resisting vague fraud and obstruction of justice allegations from federal authorities, KPMG quickly capitulated to the DOJs demands in order to save itself from certain destruction. Its not all that different, really, than the chilling effect instilled on student speech by vaguely worded campus speech codes. And the fairness of both campus disciplinary tribunals and federal courts leaves much to be desired. On our campuses, inquiring minds, taught that discretion is the better part of valor, learn to self-censor rather than face charges of verbal harassment. Outside in the real world, citizens and corporations learn that, when accused, its better to turn on former colleagues as a cooperating witness andin the words of Professor Dershowitzto learn from the feds not only how to sing, but, alas, also how to compose.The corruption of the campuses as well as that of the federal criminal justice system must both be addressed urgently, for the lessons learned in todays college classrooms and quads are quickly becoming our nations values and even its laws.One ought to recognize, Orwell wrote, that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. It is for this reason that some of us who are battling to end the tyranny of speech codes and kangaroo courts in American higher education are also working in the cause of reforming the federal criminal justice system. Orwell would be horrified, but not terribly surprised, by the corruption that has beset both.-Harvey A. Silverglate, is a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer in Boston. He wishes to acknowledge with gratitude his research assistants, Kyle Smeallie and Maria Romero, for their help in the preparation of this essay.