Ian Samuel

Ian Samuel, an Indiana University Maurer School of Law associate professor whose career was halted by a Title IX misconduct investigation last December, announced Friday he has resigned from his position.

Samuel, a former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was co-host of First Mondays, a now-defunct popular podcast about the high court. He also led a successful effort to dissuade law firms from forcing arbitration clauses on summer associates. Before teaching at Indiana, he was an associate at Jones Day and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.

“I'm choosing to forgo procedural rights that might (though I doubt it) preserve my job if I fought to the Pyrrhic end, because the academic year is over and it's time for this process to be over, too,” Samuel said in a letter to the university's provost that Samuel posted on Twitter.

Neither the university nor Samuel offered details of the allegations last December, but Title IX investigations typically result from allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct. He was placed on leave while the investigation was underway.

In his letter to university provost and executive vice president Lauren Robel, Samuel said the investigation was over. He wrote, “I don't think I'm breaching any confidences by saying that the allegations in this case describe me drinking to excess in a public place I shouldn't have been, in company I shouldn't have kept, and treating the people present in ways they didn't deserve.”

Robel on Friday did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Samuel or the investigation.

Samuel said in his intensely personal letter that some of his valued friends told him that the investigation should lead him to “take a hard look at my life.”

He added, “They were right. Once I was ready to be honest with myself, I had to admit that the night in question was the clearest sign yet of a problem that had been growing for some time … The truth is that the university's investigation, in addition to doing justice, probably had the side effect of saving my life … I was becoming an ugly man, and I needed nothing so much as a clean mirror and someone brave enough to make me look at it.”

Samuel did not spell out his next steps in life but concluded, “What I do know is that halfway through the journey of my life, I lost—through my own grievous fault—the straightforward path, my sense of right and wrong. It behooves me now to take another road.”

Dozens of replies followed Samuel's tweet, including one that said, “Regardless of what you did, it takes a man with guts to post what you posted.” But not all comments were positive. One commenter wrote, “This is a complete non-apology. This letter is all about him. Nowhere does he apologize to his victims.”

Samuel's letter is posted in full below:

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