Jury Rules Against Fired Professor who Espoused Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theory

MSN News ^ | 12/12 | Paula McMahon,

[nickcarraway]

Jurors took just three hours on Monday to rule against a controversial blogger who claimed he was fired from a tenured professorship at Florida Atlantic University in retaliation for his conspiracy theorist blogging about the Sandy Hook massacre.

James Tracy alleged that FAU violated his First Amendment rights to free speech. He wanted to be reinstated to his former position, with back pay and an unspecified amount of damages.

FAU officials say they never censored Tracy or prevented him from expressing his opinions. They say he was fired after repeatedly and intentionally refusing to file mandatory disclosure forms that require all professors to reveal outside work activities that could affect their work or the university.

The only question the jury had to answer: Was Tracy's blogging a "motivating factor" in FAU's decision to fire him? Tracy would have won if he had proven his case by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning it was more likely true than not true.

[Clutch Martin]

Occam’s razer...
[QUOTE] [Wikipedia] For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.[UNQUOTE]

Also sometimes referred to as “lex parsimoniae” law of parsimony.