Former Acting U.S. Solicitor General could raise constitutional challenge if education restructuring is voted into law
By Tara Nurin
The Rutgers University boards of trustees and governors have retained former Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal as counsel in their mounting legal challenge to New Jersey’s controversial higher education restructuring legislation. NJ Spotlight has learned that the university’s governing boards hired Katyal late last week to guide them as they fight provisions of the legislation and, if the dual Senate and Assembly bills pass into law, challenge them on constitutional grounds.
Katyal is a highly lauded constitutional attorney now in private practice who successfully defended former Attorney General John Ashcroft before the Supreme Court on charges of abuses in the war on terror. He also defended a Guantanamo Bay detainee in another Supreme Court case that determined that the secret military tribunals sought by President George W. Bush were in fact illegal.
He is expected to base his case on the premise that the law would violate contractual agreements made between the trustees and the state in 1956. According to a trustee who did not wish to be named, Katyal is charging the boards a discounted fee of $550 per hour, which the trustees will pay for with funds they’ve kept since before the 1956 act, when Rutgers was a private institution.
The trustee said, “Retaining Katyal is showing legislators that we take this thing seriously. Literally no one supports this legislation except for [South Jersey Democratic powerbroker George] Norcross and the people who work for him. We can’t let them steamroll us.”
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