Viet Dinh on legal ethics
From A Conversation with Viet D. Dinh ’93, Chief Legal and Policy Officer, Fox Corporation | CLP · · HarvardLawSchool
“One thing that I am very cognizant of and our lawyers are very cognizant of, is not to misuse our position into a leverage point for business or other decisions. If you have a strategic view, by all means contribute that — but don't say that this has to be done this way because I'm a lawyer and I insist you do it this way.”
On , Viet Dinh, Special Advisor at Fox Corp Class B, spoke about legal ethics during A Conversation with Viet D. Dinh ’93, Chief Legal and Policy Officer, Fox Corporation | CLP on HarvardLawSchool.
About Viet Dinh
Viet Dinh, the former chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, has spoken about the legal and business decisions surrounding Fox's coverage of the 2020 election and the subsequent defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. In a 2023 conversation at Harvard Law School, Dinh said that Fox's thesis was that the six weeks after the November 2020 election were "incredibly newsworthy" and that the network had a "duty to cover those allegations." He described the decision to settle the Dominion lawsuit as a business decision made to "save the organization from the cultural and reputational cost of going through this very long and hard fought trial." Dinh also stated that Fox distinguishes between news and opinion, with opinion shows protected as "political expression at the highest level of the Constitution." Dinh has also reflected on his earlier role as the chief architect of the USA PATRIOT Act, describing it as a "very limited piece of legislation" that updated the law to modern technology. He has characterized the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as "the absolute lowest point in our constitutional democracy" and "more offensive to my constitutional belief in democratic capitalism than even a foreign terrorist attack." In other remarks, Dinh has discussed the importance of judicial independence, the balance between liberty and security, and his personal background as a Vietnamese American who came to the U.S. as a child.