Policy documents would arrive full of empty second-hand phrases, awkwardly strung together. For instance: “The curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people, and any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives.” This was one of several overbearing clauses in Sussex’s “Trans and Nonbinary Equality Policy Statement”, launched with internal fanfare in 2018. The wording came from a template provided by Advance HE, an organization supposedly concerned with improving teaching standards in the higher education sector. It was robotically copied by several universities, Sussex among them.

Last year, the Office for Students issued a large fine to Sussex on the basis of introducing this policy, and cited my adverse experiences there as evidence of its chilling effect on academic freedom. Indeed, while I was working as a philosophy lecturer, attempting to broach thorny issues of sex and gender while avoiding disciplinary investigations from management, the mere sight of a link to this particular policy in an official email would cause significant clenching of my jaw. But this Wednesday, the passive-aggressive wording sidled back into my life, to enrich my dentist further. The High Court ruled that the fine had been unlawful, and the Office for Students had misapplied its own rules.  

Central to the judgment was the finding that the trans policy did not in fact count as a “governing document” — meaning that the Office for Students was wrong to conclude it ever seriously breached their regulations. Yet on the ground at the time, the policy felt very much like a governing document. Indeed, it seemed positively Stalinesque in its effect. It combined with several other EDI policies and communications to inculcate a general feeling of menace: warnings about transphobia and hate speech; instructions about preferred pronouns and how exactly to apologize if you got them wrong; links to helplines for those affected by speech-based bigotry, and trans flags fluttering all over the shop.  

But according to this week’s ruling, “governing documents” in this context only ever means constitutional texts such as statutes and charters, not policies attempting to force change in cultural values or behavioral norms. And the judge also ruled that the OFS failed to consider other Sussex policies defending freedom of speech, supposedly more definitive of the institutional stance — though as I recall, these were squirreled away in remote corners of the website, given far less prominence in everyday life. 

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There are other points in the ruling, less easy to paraphrase. Though the overall verdict is clear enough — the OFS messed up badly, misunderstood its own regulations, and also showed bias in its determination to make an example of Sussex — much of the text is taken up with the byzantine interaction of particular OFS regulations and Sussex documents, not easy for the non-specialist to decipher. Still, other matters are made transparently clear. As pertaining to the OFS’s academic freedom director, Arif Ahmed, for instance, the judge explicitly found that there was “no vitiating apparent bias in respect of Dr Ahmed’s personal role in the decision-making”, and that Sussex’s attempts to demonstrate otherwise had failed.

But history is written by the victors, as they say; and yesterday the victorious Vice-Chancellor Sasha Roseneil was doing the media rounds, calling for Ahmed’s head nonetheless. Originally a Cambridge philosopher of language, he is well-known within free speech circles for his refreshingly unadorned critiques of emotional safetyism within universities, including an earlier successful fight to see Cambridge remove a regulation requirement to be “respectful” towards opposing points of view. It would be completely in keeping with our times to see a confident plain speaker like him ousted by someone whose warm and fuzzy aim for her organization, as of yesterday, is to “continue to focus on creating an open, inclusive and respectful campus culture”.

Though herself a sociologist, Roseneil also seemed in the mood to do a bit of historical reconstruction, waxing lyrical about the university’s “proud history of being the place where the most contentious issues of the day are aired”. During court proceedings earlier this year, Sussex’s barrister even went so far as to call the university a “bastion of free speech”. Reader, I laughed. Perhaps it was once so, and could be again; I have no idea, having relinquished my former connections. But it may not surprise you to learn that this is not my recollection of the place; and nor can it really be Roseneil’s. She arrived to run it in 2022, a year after I had left.

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By Jonathan Sumption

I have described my Sussex experiences too often to rehearse them here again. By now, I am quite bored of remembering, so God knows how everyone else feels. But for an economical snapshot of what life was like back then, consider the tone and content of this “Dean’s update” email, sent by my line manager to all staff in the arts and humanities in April 2021, including me, and preserved on the internet for posterity. In particular, attend to the lengthy sections on “Equality, Diversity, Inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ inclusion”, bearing in mind that this deathless managerial prose was composed years after my public complaints about Stonewall’s overreach had first attracted local acts of animosity, and five months before the large scale protests against me started. And if you think this sounds like an “open” or even “respectful” environment in which to criticize the presence of males in women’s prisons or the medical transition of minors, I have an extremely scientific encyclopedia of gender identities to sell you.

For those who are big fans of such things, I’m sure the High Court result will be triumphantly received as proof that stories about my tumultuous time at Sussex were always overdone. The judge stated in her ruling that she was not adjudicating on the substance of those events, about which the then-Vice-Chancellor expressed profound regret at the time. Roseneil also stressed the separateness of the two matters in her own statement. But in my experience, you can’t expect people who believe in magical gender essences to care much about finer details. In any case, whatever they are saying I’m not reading it, having blissfully given up monitoring my public image in the eyes of such people a long time ago.

For related reasons, I am not clued up on exactly what this means for the sector as a whole; and nor do I really wish to remedy the deficit. But from the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicized documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fueling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicized commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgment is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasize the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fueled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.  

In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

Maugham’s cases have occasionally succeeded. In 2019, he had a hand in the application that led to the Scottish Court’s ruling that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament was unlawful. Unfortunately, two hours later, the High Court in London gave its reasons for having rebuffed Gina Miller’s plea for the same decision five days earlier. It rather overshadowed Maugham’s efforts, much to his irritation: “The decision of Scotland’s highest court made barely a ripple in the national press. The BBC made room for a single interview with me on its news channel.”

Nevertheless, his work here was arguably of public benefit. I have heard persuasive moral defences of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, but most lawyers, even on the Right, saw it as a constitutional travesty, and one that could have set a dangerous precedent.

More often, though, the GLP loses, which costs them. Last year, they were ordered to pay more than £350,000 to the Government Legal Department to cover the expense of defending failed GLP claims. This sum was mainly crowdfunded from small donors. People are free to donate as they please, of course, but questions about transparency — a virtue vaunted by the GLP — continue to swirl. When the High Court rules that your claim “fails in its entirety”, and orders you to pay 80% of the other side’s costs, as they did to the Good Law Project in their Covid appointments action, is it really ethical to spin that outcome to donors as an unalloyed victory — as having won “at every substantive level”? Yes, all right, Maugham’s co-claimant got part of what he wanted (a limited “declaration”), but both of them failed to persuade the court of the headline allegation of “cronyism”. Never — ever — to be deterred, Maugham insists that this failure was only at “a deeply technical level”, now a droll euphemism for a forensic spanking.

Indeed, the judgment in that case could be seen as paving the way for tighter restrictions on who can bring a claim for Judicial Review, which is the GLP’s modus operandi. The requirement that a claimant has to have a “sufficient interest” in the impugned decision has long been interpreted generously, in favour of campaigning groups and the like. But Maugham’s scattergun shirtiness and unabashed politicising has severely tested that generosity. Lord Reed, now president of the Supreme Court, said in 2012 that “a distinction must be drawn between the mere busybody and the person affected by or having a reasonable concern in the matter”. Thanks to the GLP’s busybodying, successive Lord Chancellors have threatened to tighten up the “sufficient interest” test, in a way that is unlikely to benefit the public. Is this what the Good Law Project is for?

Fortunately, the Napoleonic ambition of Maugham’s project looks beyond the law of Judicial Review. The GLP is now planning legal action against Instagram’s parent company, Meta, for irresponsible advertising to children. They have instructed a “global law firm” to “scan Europe for the best jurisdictions in which to litigate”. “We don’t know whether the case will win,” Maugham adds.

Thank goodness, then, that a “better metric” than success-rate, as he informs the reader, is “the frequency and aggression of the attacks directed against us by Government ministers”. Rishi Sunak once named him 10 times in a press release on plans to put tighter limits on “lawfare” — as Jolyon tells us at least three times. One gets a sense that here is where he gets his kicks. “There is no greater compliment you can be paid by the power you challenge than to force it to speak your name, to breathe into your lungs the air of power, of saliency”.

With his beady lawyer’s eye, Maugham identifies wrongdoing and forces Tory ministers to stop cheating, or so the story goes. But Bringing Down Goliath is a bold title for a tale in which Goliath suffers nothing worse than the occasional stubbed toe. Towards the end of the book, the myth-making gives way to something closer to reality. Referring to their litigation over the procurement of PPE during the pandemic, Maugham writes: “we generated literally thousands of pieces of mainstream, national media coverage about the scandal… Against that background, the ultimate decision in the case was almost irrelevant.” And so he admits what many have long suspected: the Good Law Project sees the Administrative courts as Just Stop Oil sees snooker tables — as a platform for attention-seeking.

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Let's scrap the Human Rights Act

By John Gray

As a youngster, Maugham says, he never doubted that he would be successful. And if we adopt his definition of success — basically, winding people up ‘til they slag you off — he was correct. It is his insistence that he is, and was at all relevant times, right that precipitates much of the text of this work. (“Of course I get stuff wrong sometimes,” he concedes, but details are not shared.) Journalists who upset him, colleagues who question him, solicitors who take against him, and of course judges who find against him: they all have their turpitude explained to them, in painstaking detail. This book has a central and unfulfilled purpose in common with the Good Law Project itself: the protection and improvement of the reputation of Jolyon Maugham KC.

Some who have paid attention to the sententious verbiage, the heavy-worn learning, the big head on narrow shoulders, compare Maugham to a windy little vicar from a 19th-century novel. For others, the fictional character most readily called to mind by his obsessive score-settling and unbending devotion to status — so much dinner, with so many very senior civil servants — is Alan Partridge. “Giving a speech on receiving the Praeses Elit in Dublin,” begins one of Maugham’s sentences, before it clarifies: “a prize awarded to those who have advanced the discourse in their line of work and are a source of inspiration to young people”. On this occasion, he “reflected on Gandalf standing on the bridge at Khazad-dûm in The Lord of The Rings. The fiery twin-horned Balrog approaches. And, although Gandalf knows the Balrog is too much for him, he plants his staff on the bridge and he says: ‘You shall not pass’.” As with Partridge, so with Maugham: he is much funnier than he intends to be.

Good law is difficult and, to most people, rather boring. It does not play well on social media. One benefit of the less highly networked culture of the recent past is that the acquisition of influence tended to be slow, and meritorious; whereas today, a certain kind of status within the ever-growing online legal world can be achieved swiftly, by playing to the cheap seats. So, for the time being at least, it is hard to completely refute Maugham’s clichéd insistence that “the real court is that of public opinion”.

We may look to the future with some foreboding, then; but for the GLP, it seems bright. Big plans are underway, involving tech platforms, shareable legal advice, and “ready-made legal structures” to provide “new ways for communities to live and be”. Though Maugham admits that he “can’t claim to have built a social movement”, that is clearly where his ambitions lie. And if he fails, well, the publicity generated in the attempt will render it a success — although perhaps not on a deeply technical level.

The day after Captain Tom died last February, 36-year-old Glaswegian Celtic fan Joseph Kelly substituted “Brit soldier” for “Indian”, in the manner of the IRA, in a tweet. He then clarified his position by adding: “burn auld fella, buuuuurn.” Last week, almost a year on, he was convicted by Sheriff Adrian Cottam of sending a “grossly offensive” message contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. He awaits sentence, and perhaps an appeal.

On the rare occasions when discussion of free speech trials avoids the buffers of perceived partisanship — “You were a Thursday night pot-banger so of course you want to throw the book at him” —  it is usually derailed by flitting between two separate questions: “Was the law correctly applied by the court?” and “Should the law be different?” Such flitting can of course be deliberate as well as careless.

Our answer to the first question almost always depends on the meaning of “grossly offensive”. In 2006 the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords held:

“There can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.”

As to the mental element of the offence: “the defendant must intend his words to be grossly offensive to those to whom they relate, or be aware that they may be taken to be so”. And in 2017 the High Court seems to have clarified that to mean: “taken to be so by a reasonable member of the public.”

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So, if a message is liable to cause gross offence to a person to whom it relates, and the defendant is aware that a reasonable member of the public might take it to be liable to do so, that is enough for a guilty verdict.

Now, one could argue that there is no prospect of someone taking offence at a tweet posted after they’ve died — the charge, after all, specified “offensive remarks about Captain Sir Tom”, rather than about British soldiers in general. But the appeal courts would likely find a way to close that apparent loophole — perhaps by establishing a very broad interpretation of “to whom it relates”.

Was Section 127 applied correctly then? Probably, yes. My own reaction to the tweet was, I confess, low-key: somewhere between a frown and an eye roll. But it was clearly liable to cause gross offence to Captain Tom’s family, and the defendant would surely have been aware that a reasonable member of the public might see it that way.

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But that doesn’t mean this law is any good. And that’s because it does not rest upon a shared cultural respect for a set of extreme taboos. All manner of commonplace statements are now liable to cause gross offence to those to whom they relate — yet be completely unobjectionable to almost everybody else. Yes, there are interpretative protections about the importance of context and so on, but Section 127 criminalises too much, and too vaguely.

The Indian Supreme Court came to this conclusion several years ago. The relevant parts of Section 66A of their Information Technology Act 2001 were written in near-identical terms to Section 127 of our Communications Act 2003. In striking down the legislation in 2015, the Justices held that “expressions such as ‘grossly offensive’ […] are so vague that there is no manageable standard by which a person can be said to have committed an offence or not”.

Fortunately, we might be about to catch up with the Developing World. In July last year the Law Commission recommended we get rid of Section 127. Its report noted that we lack universally accepted definitions of concepts such as “grossly offensive”; the “spectre of universal standards” should be “rejected”. Arguably, a lack of universal standards does not augur well for society — but we mustn’t deny that this is the state we find ourselves in.

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In place of Section 127, the report recommended a new offence: posting, without reasonable excuse, a communication “likely to cause harm to a likely audience”, and the Crown must prove that the defendant intended harm. Harm is defined as, at a minimum, serious psychological distress. This is, on the face of it, a great improvement. And last Friday, the Government published an interim response expressing their intention to add this offence to the Online Safety Bill.

So unlike Section 127, the new offence would require proof of an intention to cause serious psychological distress. And even when a defendant did hold that intention, he or she could argue that the message wasn’t actually likely to be seen by anyone likely to be seriously distressed by it. This could place heavier responsibility on the bigger Twitter accounts, which is as it should be. And “It was supposed to be a joke”, “I didn’t mean any harm by it”, “I didn’t expect it to be retweeted so much”, and even “in the circumstances it was fair enough” (reasonable excuse) could all, if this law is enacted, become relevant parts of a defence.

But there is a twist. The Law Commission’s original plan, in the consultation paper, was that the Crown need only prove that the defendant was aware of the risk that harm might be caused. This is a much lower threshold than intention. The reason for their change of heart, they repeatedly emphasised, is that the Online Safety Bill imposes a legal duty on social media companies to remove harmful content — including content that is not illegal.

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So a complaint to Twitter about the removal of a perfectly lawful tweet could be met with the response, “Yes, but the only reason tweets like this are not illegal is because we have to delete them”. Of course, the State delegating its natural responsibilities to private companies is nothing new. But to do so to this extent — narrowing the ambit of an important piece of criminal legislation at the heart of our right to Free Speech — is a worrying development, and does not sit well with the Law Commission’s stated aim of “technological neutrality”, or their intention that new offences be “future-proofed”.

If a behaviour is so wrong that it should be criminal, it ought not to slip through the net simply because global tech companies will be told to prevent it. The Law Commission rightly expressed concern about the “inconsistent application” of the Section 127 offence. But if there is one thing all sides can agree on it is that Twitter’s moderation policies are known for little else.

The high bar of intention to cause harm is a welcome development, and a measure of offensive dross in the digital public square is a price worth paying: for freedom, yes, but also for the sense of freedom, particularly among people at the less free end of the socio-economic spectrum. But instead of requiring social media companies to remove non-criminal material, it might be better — safer, even, in the long-run — if they were prevented from doing so. After all, responsibility for deciding what can and cannot be said should rest, perhaps, with any reasonable member of the public. And most of them are not on Twitter.

Except, of course, it turned out to be nonsense: for 2006-2008, the conviction rates for Snaresbrook and Kingston were within 1% of each other, either side of the national average of 63.9%. I suspect that this did little to dent the audience’s confidence in one of the profession’s most dearly held beliefs: arch references to Kingston juries still abound in London’s robing rooms.

But this was not the only surprise Professor Thomas delivered. The evidence, which came from analysis of over half a million criminal charges as well as a randomised trial with real jurors, strongly supported the proposition that white juries do not discriminate against black defendants. Indeed, it even appeared that a white defendant accused of a racially motivated crime is more likely to be convicted by a white jury than by a racially mixed one.

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Those findings do not, of course, call into question the unfairnesses suffered by the non-white population upstream of trial — if anything they could be said to emphasise them, given that non-white people are over-represented in prisons. But they did allay the fears expressed in the Auld report of 2001, which made a recommendation (not subsequently implemented) that “Provision should be made to enable ethnic minority representation on juries where race is likely to be relevant to an important issue in the case”. Whether the findings have entrenched themselves in the public consciousness more generally, however, is another matter.

Last month, Professor Thomas — now an honorary QC — published the results of a new study, commissioned by the senior judiciary to investigate “rape myths”. Her conclusions are thoroughly at odds with received wisdom.

The idea that many people — and therefore many jurors — hold seriously wayward beliefs about this uniquely enraging crime is not new, and has solidified in recent years. It first became common in the early 2000s for judges to warn juries to approach with caution defence counsel’s arguments about, for instance, a lack of physical violence, or a delay in making a report. Such warnings were swiftly approved by the Court of Appeal and found their way into the “Bench Book” — the judges’ bible of approved jury directions.

The need for these warnings arose from a developing understanding that inaccurate assumptions about how rape allegations should be analysed are widespread among the public. The 2010 Bench Book pointed to “research by those who are expert in the subject”, much of which derived its data from surveys. One cited author concluded that “the crucial determinant of judgments about rape cases is the extent to which people subscribe to rape myths. Thus it tends to be attitudes rather than an unbiased evaluation of the facts which determine judgments in these cases.”

And that message has grown louder in the decade since. In 2018 End Violence Against Women (EVAW) commissioned a YouGov poll and reported that “33% think that sex which happens without consent, but where there is no physical violence, isn’t really rape.” Horrifying to think that any jurors have that attitude, let alone a full third of them. No wonder, then, that judicial warnings have become more robust.

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For example, on the question of inconsistencies (which is of course a way to get purchase on the evidence in any trial) 2010’s bench book includes the following direction for sexual offences: “The experience of the courts is that it is unwise to approach the issue of inconsistency with the assumption that a true account is always consistent, or that an inconsistent account is always untrue. It depends on the circumstances and the individual.” And concludes with, “If…you are sure that the essential parts of the complainant’s account are true, you will no doubt act on that conclusion. But, if you are left in doubt about the truthfulness of the complainant’s account, because the inconsistencies cannot be satisfactorily explained, you must find the defendant Not Guilty.”

Fair enough. But the equivalent part of the 2020 version runs as follows: “Experience has shown that inconsistencies in accounts can happen whether a person is telling the truth or not”. And the line about doubt arising from inconsistencies that can’t be satisfactorily explained has disappeared.

Now, these are only short extracts, and much of the thrust is between-the-lines and therefore open to debate. But these warnings are not there primarily to help the defence. Some of them are felt to amount to a nudge in the other direction. Which might be fair — desperately needed even — if jurors believe rape myths. But it now looks like they don’t.

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The UCL Jury Project surveyed almost 800 recently discharged jurors and found that “hardly any jurors believe what are often referred to as widespread myths and stereotypes about rape and sexual assault”. They don’t believe that rape must leave bruises, that a victim will always fight back, that dressing “provocatively” is inviting an assault, or that rapes will always be swiftly reported. But haven’t previous studies repeatedly found the precise opposite?

The reason for the disparity, the Professor suggests, is that her study involved actual jurors rather than members of the public. The jurors had heard trials of non-sexual as well as sexual offences, and of those approached 99% agreed to participate, which means a very low risk of selection bias. Something may be happening, she says, when a member of the public actually goes through the solemn process of sitting on a jury.

Another possible reason for the disparity, it seems to me, is that conclusions from other research don’t always accurately reflect the questions asked. Take the 2018 EVAW headline I mentioned. The small print reveals that the question, with which 33% of respondents disagreed, was, “Do you personally consider it to be rape if they don’t want to have sex but feel pressured to even though there was no other physical violence?” Leaving aside the confusing and redundant “other” (what was the first bit of violence again?) this is absolutely not identical to “Do you think that sex which happens without consent, but where there is no physical violence, isn’t really rape?” Indeed, the 2020 Bench Book even says, “reluctant but free agreement is not the same thing as submission and is still consent even if reluctantly given.”

But why does it matter? Aren’t judicial warnings a good idea just in case? Well, sometimes the defence’s arguments — about delays and injuries and intoxication and inconsistencies — are good arguments. And if the jurors aren’t prejudiced, then a warning about rape myths could easily be taken as a veiled encouragement to ignore a good point. And bad defence arguments? They’ll surely be counterproductive with a myth-free jury.

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Shortly before Professor Thomas published her results the Crown Prosecution Service updated and expanded its list of rape myths, with a consultation on their accuracy and usefulness ongoing. Shortly after that, EVAW published another report, entitled “The Decriminalisation of Rape”. Under the heading “Obstacles to Conviction” is listed the very fact of trial by jury, and it goes on to state, “it has been widely accepted by criminal justice bodies that many members of the public continue to believe in long-standing myths and stereotypes relating to rape”. A lively public conversation seems inevitable — and desirable.

Also listed as an obstacle to conviction, interestingly, is the English “adversarial system” of criminal trials. Adversarial systems are having a bit of a moment: the software that creates those amazingly realistic faces of non-existent people, for instance, uses a type of Artificial Intelligence called a General Adversarial Network: progress is made by one algorithm trying to create something convincing, and another that tries to find the holes. This is very much not the tech equivalent of a continental inquisitorial magistrate. A bad defence point is best dealt with by a good prosecution point. It may turn out that the medieval jurists who designed our legal system were onto something.

And a similar process — a dialectic approach to enquiry more generally — is arguably a better route to the truth than any other. There has until now been very little questioning of the prevalence of rape myths among juries, and it’s not hard to see why: who wants to be “that guy”? But Professor Thomas’s research should be welcomed. Her methodology, and her conclusions, might turn out to be wrong. But they should not be ignored.