A Conversation with Viet D. Dinh ’93, Chief Legal and Policy Officer, Fox Corporation | CLP

Which it's goal is to do exactly what it sounds like. Which is to try to both study and teach about the profession and to give students an idea of what are the opportunities and possibilities for professional careers. But also to talk about the complex and interesting issues that lawyers often find themselves in the middle of. And my guess is today we're going to have a good opportunity to examine some of those issues. Before we get started, just a couple of housekeeping rules. This is being both recorded and live streamed. And that's why when we get time for questions, and I promise we are going to save a very good amount of time for questions from all of you. Viet has generously agreed to answer any question that people have for him here. I will repeat the questions, because there are a couple of thousand people on the live stream. And my guess as many more will watch after that. Which is an indication of why I'm very delighted that we're having this event here today. Let me just say a little bit by way of background. I first met Viet on the very first day of... I think we were in Langdell North or something like that. I had a giant seating chart in front of me just with names on them. We hadn't even figured out how to pick pictures on them. And in typical Harvard Law School fashion, I was going to call on a student to recite the facts of the case, which I think was Goldberg versus Kelly at the time. And I looked down... which it probably still is for many of you today. I looked down and I saw Dinh and I said, 'Miss Dinh, pleased...' and it turned out... Miss Dinh. Sheepishly, there was a silence and then a sheepish, 'I'm Mr. Dinh,' and that's how we first met. He and his family literally escaped via a boat from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. He had arrived in this country, basically had worked picking vegetables in his early life. First maybe in Texas before moving to California... where was he from? Oregon. Oregon before moving to California, where he was, quite frankly, discovered by a teacher who said, 'You are really bright. You should have higher aspirations than he probably thought he could ever have.' Had stayed behind because his father had been imprisoned, and she wanted to stay there with him. And she stayed, and eventually her father escaped and eventually she escaped, but she was caught in a Hong Kong refugee camp. And so at the time we met, and I'm not quite sure, I think I was having lunch with all my students in groups of ten or something like that. We talked and he told me the story. And I said, 'Well, let me see what we can do to help.' So we spent much of the next year enlisting people who we knew who were in the Bush administration, the H.W. Bush administration at the time. I think it's fair to say we don't agree on everything and that may come out here. We have different views on a lot of different things. But he remains one of the most extraordinary people that I've met. And when we were in touch around the death of Charles Ogletree, which was also a mentor of Viet's when he was here and was a dear friend of mine, I said to him, 'Viet, you know, if you're ever around you should come and talk to students about some of the issues that you have been dealing with. I'm sure there will be tremendous interest.' And the fact that there's kind of standing room only in the back of the room shows that there is indeed. So as I said, a little bit about how he got to his current position, as the General Counsel at Fox. And then some of the issues that he's confronted there, and what the role of the General Counsel is in those issues. And this is partly my interest in our interest in the center, in the legal profession, is to talk about what is the role of lawyers, particularly general counsels? Which is a role that there's been, quite frankly, very little even today, attention to, especially in law schools. And yet, I'm going to argue, is one of the most important roles in the legal profession. They encounter many important public issues. And the question is, what's the role of the general counsel in those sort of issues? Because they're not the owners and managers of the business, they're not the clients, and yet they play a very influential role. So with that in mind, Viet, I want to start here. Before you took the role at Fox, you had had pretty much every job anyone could have in the legal profession. You'd been a law clerk, including on the Supreme Court for Justice O'Connor. You had worked in the Department of Justice as... several of which are boutique, Supreme Court focused or appellate focused litigation boutiques. And you had then negotiated the merger of that boutique into one of the biggest, most successful law firms in the country, Kirkland & Ellis, many of you know. So after all that, why did you decide you were interested in being a general counsel?

Multi-functional ideas, one I want to pick up on which I think will lead us into some of the substantive discussion. That is, I said general counsel has a unique role because of where it sits. But often, and this was the case with you, you had multiple hats. In other words, you were the chief legal and compliance officer, but you were also the chief policy officer. You were also head of government relations and public relations. You also sat in as a member of what I think it's called the office of the chairman. That sounds very legal in ways that the students I think can understand. But when you start talking about public relations, government affairs, strategy, all those other things. What are the lines between where you are as a lawyer and where you are in these other roles? How is that in turn distinguished from the people who are making the substantive policy, business decisions, editorial content, whatever for the network itself?

So Viet, this brings us to, I think, an issue that every one of the students knows, and that's put you both in the news and maybe in the hot seat a little bit, and that's the Dominion voting litigation and the kind of penumbra around it. Because here you've got something that is both on the one hand legal, it's a lawsuit that's been brought against your clients, but it also implicates things that are at the core of what the business model of Fox News is, how Fox News exercises its editorial judgment, and you are also a member of this larger management team. So can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, obviously there was a lot of publicity around this lawsuit. There was an $800 million settlement eventually around this lawsuit. There was a lot of discussion around what that meant about the underlying conduct.

Thank you for that. One of the things you said there that my guess is again, and we're going to go to questions pretty shortly. I've just got a couple more things I want to ask. Of course, about the First Amendment and about the effect on democracy. That was, of course, one of the big issues that people have talked about, particularly in light of what happened on January 6th. Particularly with respect to the role of the general counsel, is what is the line between reporting on the news and the news reporting division of which you could say, what are the results of the election so to speak? And the editorial content and the editorialization of Fox News hosts. As a general counsel, presumably there must be legal constraints around both of those things, but they're not necessarily the same thing. And how do you as a general counsel, what is your role, particularly with respect to the second of these things?

I'm going to go to questions from the audience. But I have one last thing that builds on exactly what you said, because there was no on-air host whose opinion was more amplified and also whose emails were more exposed than Tucker Carlson. And while many of the things we've been talking about, you've been critiqued from the left, I'd say there's been a fair amount of criticism from the right about the firing of Tucker Carlson. And how does that fit in with what you just talked about? In particular, again, what's the role of the general counsel in making that decision?

The floor is open, please. Viet, sorry. I'm sorry. If you don't mind, I'm just going to repeat the question. Such a good question, I had to jump into it. The question was, if Fox has had for a long time owned the center-right audience, there are now new networks even further to the right.

Thank you. Yes, please here.

I think the question was, looking back now Viet, we've now had more than 20 years and also looking forward in terms of what's happening in the world today, maybe how do you think about the balance that was struck with that act and what are the implications moving forward as technology allows us to be much more intrusive in terms of surveillance than was certainly the case when you were thinking about those issues in 2001?

Again, sorry, just a report. No, but it's a great question. The essence of it is Viet said that every on-air person and others get training in the First Amendment. The question really was how are you training on the issue of malice, which is both a legal standard, but it's obviously also a judgment call? Has that training changed, particularly in light of the fact that in the settlement there is an acknowledgment that the standard may have been met. Certainly whatever was acknowledged in the settlement...