University of Virginia Goes to Court to Fight Subpoena for Climate Scientist's Papers and Emails. By Rosalind S. Helderman, WashPost, May 28, 2010. "Virginia's flagship university went to court Thursday to fight an effort by Virginia Attorney Gen Ken Cuccinelli II (R) to get documents from a former climate scientist at the school, an unusual confrontation that will test the bounds of academic freedom and result in the college facing down its own lawyer in court. In a motion filed in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia argued that Cuccinelli's subpoena for papers and e-mail from global warming researcher Michael Mann exceeds the attorney general's authority under state law and intrudes on the rights of professors to pursue academic inquiry free from political pressure. Cuccinelli, a vocal skeptic of global warming who is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the issue, has said he is investigating whether Mann committed fraud by knowingly skewing data as he sought publicly funded grants for his research. Mann left U-Va. in 2005 and now works at Penn State. Mann's case has been embraced by academics across the country, who wrote numerous letters encouraging the university founded by Thomas Jefferson to resist the attorney general...
"Mann is best known as the author of the 'hockey-stick' graph, which showed there has been a rapid, recent rise in the Earth's temperature. Mann's work has long been under attack by global-warming skeptics, particularly after an e-mail between scientists and referring to a statistical 'trick' he used in his research surfaced in a series of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Mann has said the e-mail was taken out of context. Some of his methodologies have been criticized by other scientists, but an inquiry by Penn State concluded that there was no evidence Mann engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data."
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