Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com

Michigan State University has appointed Robert Young Jr., a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, as vice president and general counsel to take over a legal department rocked by the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal and its aftermath.

Young will succeed acting general counsel Kristine Zayko on June 1. Zayko, a former deputy GC at MSU who had stepped up to run the department, has said she will return to private practice.

Zayko had replaced former general counsel Robert Noto, who resigned in mid-February under pressure over his handling of the Nassar matter. Noto and Zayko, both 20-year veterans of the legal department, were heavily criticized for their roles in allowing the scandal to grow and explode into national headlines. A third in-house lawyer, assistant GC Kristine Moore, also has been attacked for leading an inadequate investigation that cleared Nassar of abuse in 2014.

Young, 60, currently of counsel in the Lansing office of Dickinson Wright, knows what he is getting into. He has been serving as special counsel for MSU since Noto left. Young coordinated responses to the multiple investigations and lawsuits against the university, and oversaw the negotiations that resulted in a $500 million settlement in principle last week with Nassar's victims.

“Bob did a tremendous job representing MSU during the recent mediation and achieving an equitable outcome for all,” Interim President John Engler said in a statement. “As the university moves forward, we will draw on his prior appellate judicial experience as well as his time in private practice where he served as a general counsel for one of Michigan's leading companies.”

That leading company was AAA Michigan, where Young served as vice president and GC for several years. “His leadership and expertise will be a great asset to the MSU legal team,” Engler added.

Young has had a distinguished legal career. The Harvard law grad appeared on President Donald Trump's final list of 20 potential U.S. Supreme Court justice nominees, along with Neil Gorsuch, who was eventually chosen for the seat.

Young served on the Michigan Supreme Court from 1999-2017, where he was the longest-serving chief justice. He resigned last year to run for a U.S. Senate seat as a Republican, but dropped out of the race in January citing inadequate funding.

As chief justice, Young developed a strategic plan to measure judicial performance, track public satisfaction, adopt best practices and implement technologies to expand public access, increase efficiency and boost the productivity of trial courts. His program led to the cutting of 26 judgeships statewide.

Before his Michigan Supreme Court appointment, Young served on the Michigan Court of Appeals and had been a partner at Dickinson Wright. He also has been an adjunct professor of law at MSU since 2015, teaching civil trial advocacy.

He has written treatises on civil procedure, and several articles from his viewpoint as a self-proclaimed “disciplined judicial traditionalist.” He explained the term means letting the legislature declare public policy while the judicial branch interprets and “construes the words of the statutes.”

Another article he wrote condemns using common law as a vehicle for judicial lawmaking. Young compared common law to a “drunken, ancient toothless relative,” forever present at a genteel garden party.

Not everyone was pleased when Young was hired as MSU's special counsel in the Nassar scandal. Some critics objected because he had written opinions on cases that refused to hold a company or a government entity liable for rape or sexual abuse by employees, even when employers had been forewarned.

Attorney Rachael Denhollander, the woman and victim who first spoke out against Nassar, strongly opposed Young's initial hiring. She told the Detroit News that Young has “an absolutely abhorrent track record as a judge, on the specific issue of sexual assault.”

Denhollander accused Young of having a “consistent record of being part of the culture of abuse. This is not change. This is not transparency. This is institutional protectionism.”