Biography
James Richard Scarce, known as Rik Scarce, is a sociologist and author who was jailed for civil contempt in 1993 after refusing, on scholarly-privilege grounds, to tell a federal grand jury about confidential conversations with a research subject. As a doctoral student at Washington State University, Scarce had interviewed radical environmental and animal-liberation activists for his book Eco-Warriors. After a 1991 Animal Liberation Front raid caused roughly 100,000 dollars in damage to university animal-research laboratories — an action linked to Rod Coronado, who had stayed at the Scarce family home — a grand jury in Spokane, Washington demanded that Scarce reveal what his sources had told him. Invoking a researcher privilege analogous to a journalist privilege, and the code of ethics of the American Sociological Association, he refused. U.S. District Judge Wm. Fremming Nielsen jailed him on May 14, 1993, and he was held for 159 days — at the time the longest U.S. jailing of a scholar for protecting research sources — before being released that October when the judge found further confinement merely punitive rather than coercive. Scarce later completed his doctorate, became a professor of sociology, and wrote Contempt of Court: A Scholar's Battle for Free Speech from Behind Bars.
Birth-year sources
- KrimDok authority record and the Victorian Government Library Service catalogue — both identify author Rik Scarce as born in 1958.
- Skidmore College biography — links the author and sociologist to the same 1993 contempt imprisonment documented in this profile.
The American Sociological Association’s institutional history describes its support for Rik Scarce’s protection of confidential research sources. Following a Council ballot, ASA filed an amicus brief arguing that social-science research depends on confidentiality and should receive qualified protection from compelled disclosure. The history connects this controversy to subsequent work on ethical guidelines and legal support for researchers.
