New York Attorney General Opens Criminal Investigation into Cornell University Rape Allegations
Cornell’s Failed Investigation Is a Breach of Trust, Not a Mere Procedural Error
When power meant to protect a woman from violent assault instead shields institutions from embarrassment, government has already stepped outside lawful authority and into usurpation—and only sharper, revocable oversight can call it back.
I begin not with the governor’s executive order but with a woman, known to the public only as Jane Doe, who says she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house. She told campus police in November 2024 that she had been sexually assaulted; later she spoke with the university’s internal investigators; still later she filed a civil complaint naming seven fraternity members and accusing them of sexual assault and rape. According to reports, she could not have been clearer that she was 100% confident she had been raped. These are not light injuries of reputation. They go to life, health, liberty itself.
In the state of nature, as I argued in the Second Treatise of Government, reason teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Men and women form governments only that these basic goods, this broad property, may be better secured by known laws and impartial judges. When the harm alleged is sexual assault, especially gang rape, the wrong is as grave as any that falls short of murder. If a woman who says she was thus violated must then run a “draining maze” merely to be heard, she has gained little by leaving the state of nature for such a commonwealth.
In this case, there were campus police, a university disciplinary process, and the office of a county prosecutor. These authorities are not private counselors; they hold power on trust, to inquire diligently and, where the evidence permits, to prosecute. Yet we are told there are now “serious questions about the investigation conducted by the Cornell Police Department and the decision by the Tompkins County District Attorney not to prosecute.” The governor herself has said this woman was “failed” at “every turn” by people obligated to protect her, including police and the prosecutor. If that description holds, then power has not merely erred; it has betrayed its trust.
The district attorney insists that his office “did not and could not” base a 2024 decision on a civil lawsuit filed nearly two years later. That is, on its face, a reasonable point; no man can be blamed for not knowing what did not yet exist. But this defense, even if granted, does not touch the deeper question: whether the information that was available then was pursued with the rigor such an accusation demands. The dark cloud now hanging over the campus, the students’ open shame and anger, and the need for a later reopening of the investigation all suggest that, at best, the confidence of the public in the impartiality and diligence of those first entrusted has been shaken.
Where the ordinary course of justice appears to fail, rulers sometimes resort to what I called prerogative: power to act for the public good without, and even against, the usual rule. Here, the governor has appointed a special prosecutor, the state’s attorney general, and says she will not permit this matter to be swept under the rug. A new, “active criminal investigation” has been announced. Such an act stands outside the daily routine of prosecution. It is justified, if at all, precisely because the people perceive that those who should have judged were, in effect, judges in their own case, too bound up with institutional habits and reputations to command trust.
But prerogative is a dangerous medicine. In the Second Treatise I wrote that such extraordinary power is tolerable only so long as it is visibly exercised for the public good and remains revocable. If special prosecutors become a standing substitute for ordinary justice, or if executives learn to wield these appointments as instruments of arbitrary will, the cure will exceed the disease. The right lesson here is not that one governor can always rescue a failed case, but that police, universities, and local prosecutors must be so constituted, checked, and answerable that women alleging such crimes meet an impartial judge the first time, not only after public outcry.
Still, I note with some hope that the response has not been despair but organized resistance within the forms of law. Students gather, ashamed and angry, to voice demands for “drastic change.” A “Justice for Survivors” protest is called. The investigation is reopened; a new prosecutor takes up the file. Society has not dissolved. On the contrary, by pressing institutions to answer for this failure toward Jane Doe, the people show that when a particular exercise of government power dissolves—through negligence or worse—the community need not fall into chaos, but can, by lawful means, seek better guardians of its trust. That is how a free people remembers what government is for.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.