Judge allows Robertsons to amend complaint

The judge hearing the Robertson Foundation lawsuit upheld the Robertson family's right to amend their complaint in a ruling Wednesday.

The Robertsons filed new allegations in June to bolster their two-year-old attack on the University, asserting that the University misspent more than $100 million of the family's gift on unauthorized projects and tried to conceal its actions.

Those claims, among others, will now become part of the contentious lawsuit. The family's amended complaint also adds the charge of fraud against the University and allows for the possibility of punitive damages.

In his ruling, Judge Neil Shuster of Mercer County Superior Court ruled that the more than 1,000 pages of evidence the plaintiffs appended to their amended filing should not be included with the new complaint. Those pages will be considered during the trial.

"The court sees no need . . . for references to both non-confidential and confidential appendices in the already-detailed complaint," Shuster wrote in his ruling.

University General Counsel Peter McDonough released a statement Thursday in response to Shuster's ruling.

"By conditioning its decision upon plaintiffs' revision of the amended complaint to delete references to thousands of pages of documents, and precluding the attachment of those documents to the amended complaint, the Court has addressed our major concern," the statement said.

But Seth Lapidow, a Robertson family lawyer, argued that Shuster's decision to withhold the additional evidence has no impact on the case.

"The evidence attached to our complaint will be admissible at trial and the judge can read it then," Lapidow said.

Shuster also pushed back the tentative trial date to February 2006 from October 2005.

The Robertsons sued the University in July 2002, outraged because they believe the University has ignored their gift's original purpose: training Wilson School graduate students for careers in government, especially in international service.

"The ruling broadens and deepens the seriousness of this lawsuit and subjects Princeton to a new standard of disclosure and a greater potential liability," said William Robertson '72, chief plaintiff and son of original donors Charles '26 and Marie Robertson.

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Fewer than 12 percent of the school's graduates have pursued careers in government service, the family says. The Robertsons want to give the nearly $600 million endowment supporting the Wilson School to a different university or other programs.

The two sides will continue to provide documents to the other party and interview witnesses until July, when the discovery phase of the case ends.

"We will continue to work within the judicial process and we will stay attentive to opportunities for resolving the differences among the trustees of the Robertson Foundation," wrote McDonough to conclude the University's statement.