Tiara Ross suspected of cheating in Moritz Law Journal competition

"To make ourselves clear, we are not looking for an excuse or explanation of the situation."

Tiara Ross is an Assistant Columbus City Attorney currently running for a City Council seat in District 7.

Ross earned headlines last week when The Rooster exposed her driving on a suspended license while owing $3,975 in unpaid parking tickets. Three days later, Jordan Laird of The Columbus Dispatch added additional reporting that showed Ross had her license suspended at least four times in her adult life.

Ross made a dubious claim last week, while under oath at the Board of Elections at her residency hearing, that she was unaware of any problems with her license or registration on her 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe.

She also lied to George Shillcock III of WOSU on Thursday, saying she had “taken care” of the tickets while, in reality, still having an outstanding debt that wasn’t cleared until 6 p.m. that day.

Those actions fall into a long pattern of questionable behavior that stretches across her adult life, all the way back to Ross’ time at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law.

In 2010, Ross submitted an entry to the prestigious Moritz law journal writing contest. The competition took place between her first and second year of law school. It consisted of two parts: Writing and editing.

When the third-year law students scored the submissions, they found Ross’ editorial entry mirrored another competitor’s entry to the point the third-year students suspected that the two had worked together, which was strictly against the competition rules.

Participating in a law journal is seen as a rite of passage and a badge of honor at any law school. For example, Barack Obama was the Editor in Chief of the Harvard Law Review. If you look at the prior membership of Ohio State’s most prestigious law journal, The Ohio State Law Journal, you’ll see names that have risen through the law profession in Columbus and nationally. In addition to the Ohio State Law Journal, there were four other journals at Ohio State for which the competitors’ entries were considered.

The third-year students’ concerns were brought to the five editors-in-chief of those journals, as they were the students ultimately responsible for coordinating the competition and extending journal membership to applicants. One of those five editors-in-chief was Hilltop Husband, my spouse.

The five editors-in-chief concurred with the student scorers that the editing submissions from Ross and the other student were extremely similar and that it was very unlikely that would have happened by chance. This evidence of copying or coordinating answers—if reported to the school’s Honor Council—could have led to Ross and the other student being expelled from the law school, which would obviously torpedo their future legal careers.

However, the five heads of the journals offered Ross a second option: Remove yourself from the competition, and we won’t report you to the Honor Council.

The email accusation and offer was sent to Ross at 9:49am on July 3, 2010… a Saturday:

Ross did not need anywhere close to the ~53 hours given to decide her course of action.

A little over two hours later—at 2:34 p.m. to be exact—she sent a three-sentence email from her BlackBerry removing herself from the competition.

The Rooster would not publish this item as a standalone piece. College students do stupid things, and Ross took the apparent reprieve and rose to a city attorney job where she made $145,000 last year, according to The Dispatch.

On their own, the suspicions of cheating aren’t damning. But when you add them on top of Ross’ repeated license suspensions, driving despite having a suspension in 2012, her failure to timely complete her continuing legal education requirements in 2022, driving on a suspended license from fall of 2023 until last week, and accruing $3,795 in unpaid parking tickets, a clear pattern exists. This is not someone who messed up once or twice; this is someone who doesn’t think the rules apply to her.

Which is to say, someone who has no business sitting on city council. Ross simply isn’t ready for primetime.

Vivek Ramaswamy and his rent-a-henchman put in a lot of work to delay the inevitable