Fired Law Professor blames family for job loss in new lawsuit

The Advocate's Andrea Gallo writes:

Attorney and fired Southern University Law Center Professor Dorothy Jackson filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against a family and an attorney who accused her of using her position for wrongdoing, and her attorney warned that anyone who has recently questioned Jackson’s behavior should “buckle up and get ready” to be served with a lawsuit of their own.

Jackson filed the lawsuit as a counterclaim to a lawsuit that Jacquelyn Antoine, daughter of Helen Plummer, filed against Jackson earlier this year. Antoine and her attorney said that Jackson along with the East Baton Rouge Council on Aging and other agencies conspired to coerce the elderly Plummer into leaving money in her will for the Council on Aging’s executive director, Tasha Clark-Amar.

Jackson drafted Plummer’s will in 2016 at Southern’s Elder Law Clinic, and the will left more than $100,000 over 20 years for Clark-Amar to be the executor and trustee of Plummer’s estate. Jackson is also a Council on Aging board member.

The Southern University board of supervisors voted unanimously Friday to uphold the firing of law professor Dorothy Jackson, who was terminate…

Both Clark-Amar and Jackson stepped off the will after Plummer’s family questioned it. Plummer's family members said they had never heard of Clark-Amar until after Plummer died and Clark-Amar called to tell the family that she would be overseeing the estate. After Southern convened a faculty panel to investigate the incident, Southern’s President Ray Belton fired Jackson in February and the board of supervisors did not accept her appeal.

Jackson’s lawsuit names Antoine, and Antoine’s attorney, Robert Garrity. The suit, filed Monday in the 19th Judicial District Court, says Garrity knowingly included false statements in the lawsuit he filed earlier this year against Jackson and the Council on Aging.