Ethics Observations on the A.I. Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt Fake Fight Video

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That video was posted two days ago by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, who was nominated for an Oscar in the short film category in 2002. He says his faux fight came from a two-line prompt into A.I. bot Seedance 2.0, owned by the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ByteDance.

The video went viral after screenwriter Rhett Reese (“Deadpool & Wolverine”, “Zombieland”) posted dire thoughts about what it portends on Twitter/”X.” earlier this week.“I hate to say it,” Reese wrote. “It’s likely over for us.”

““In next to no time,” he wrote later, ” one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous.” Now Hollywood is trembling in terror.

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Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cal.) Locks Up “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” AND Chases the Leaders in the Super-Competitive 2026 “Unethical Asshole of the Year” Race!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

This is so exciting!

Also depressing, of course. I believe it is fair to conclude that the U.S. Congress has never had so many unqualified, intellectually inferior, obnoxious, ethics-free jackasses staining its halls and reputation at the same time. True, it is difficult to assess the quality of our elected officials prior to, say, World War II, but my conclusion is based on the belief that if the U.S. ever had a government more dominated by knaves, villains and fools, we wouldn’t have lasted this long.

Even with such daunting competition (Marjory Taylor Green, “The Squad,” Rep. Raskin, Rep. Boebert, Senator Senator Hirono, et al.) Khanna managed to stand out yesterday. No only did he state on the floor of the House and on public media that four men were sex criminals when they were not, he followed up his indefensible gaffe by refusing to apologize and instead stooping to “Whataboutism,” Rationalization #2, the Democratic Party’s favorite after #22, “It’s not the worst thing.” Here is #2, if you haven’t reviewed the Rationalization List lately:

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Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown University Law Center…and May I Add: KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Ethics Alarms, December 10, 2023…

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

I just received this message as a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus:

Dear Georgetown Law Alumni,

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that M. Elizabeth (Liz) Magill has been appointed as the next Executive Vice President and Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, beginning August 1, 2026. President Robert M. Groves’ announcement is linked here.

Professor Magill brings to Georgetown Law a wealth of experience leading some of our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools, including serving as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, and Dean of Stanford Law School. I am pleased to share that, in addition to her role as Executive Vice President and Dean, Professor Magill will join the Law Center as a tenured member of the faculty. And her Georgetown roots run deep—her father and three of her siblings are Georgetown graduates.

Professor Magill is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is an award-winning scholar of administrative and constitutional law whose research focuses on topics such as the separation of powers, standing, regulation, and judicial review. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Law Institute.

This is a critical time for the Law Center and the University. I am confident that Professor Magill is the right person to lead the Law Center into a new era marked by academic excellence, financial resilience, and national prominence. There will be many opportunities over the next several months for you to meet Professor Magill. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her to Georgetown University and to the Law Center. 

Sincerely,

Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Interim Dean & Executive Vice President
David Belding Professor of Law

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Why No, I Didn’t Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Free-lance journalist Michael Tracy pointed out on “X” that all of the “victims” who Rep. Jayapal demanded that Pam Bondi apologize to were adults at the time of their claimed victimization by Jeffrey Epstein. Tracy asked if any news organization bothered to mention that rather salient point, especially since the Left’s narrative connecting President Trump to Epstein rests on calling Trump a presumed “pedo”-by-association.

It seems the answer is no. I certainly assumed the hand-raising women at Bondi’s hearing were all sexually exploited as minors.

The Epstein obsession is such an Ethics Train Wreck, and such a dumb one my eye-balls hurt from rolling. If Democrats succeed in the mid-terms because of the duel mendacities of the Epstein innuendos and the even dumber “affordability” talking point (“How dare Trump not lower the prices our incompetence raised?”), I think it will be fair to say that the American public is no longer intelligent enough for a republic.

I recommend a conservatorship.

In an excellent Wall Street Journal piece (which I no longer can find) on what the Epstein files didn’t include, the author wrote that the news media and Democrats are focusing on Trump’s past denials that he ever knew or suspected what his fellow billionaire was doing, when what they should be focusing on was that he alone among the many names being exposed in the files “got the hell out of there,” as soon as Epstein’s teenage girls turned up.

But that wouldn’t be “advocacy journalism.”

The Fantasy Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t want to dwell on the headline above from the Times, but this is just another example of how, as in democracy’s death of a thousand cuts, our journalists deceive, confuse and manipulate public opinion. They also think they are clever about it, just as they think they are smarter than they are.

“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet,” the Times piece begins. “The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.”

Well.

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A Shocking Ice Dancing Judging Scandal at the Winter Olympics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

You can read the details of this completely predictable and in general ridiculous ice-dancing judging scandal here, here, and here. I’m not going recount the details because the details are misleading.

The ethics story is that the American ice dancing team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates lost the gold to the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron because a French judge, Jezabel Dabouis, favored Beaudry and Cizeron by nearly eight points (make that “points”) over the three-time world champions in the free dance, a margin inexplicable when compared to the scores of the other judges, and so large that if her score were removed entirely, Chock and Bates would have won the top prize easily.

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Friday Forum: Just Don’t Talk About Valentine’s Day, Please…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I’m dreading tomorrow. I have a lively, interesting and strange life, but in almost two years since Grace died, I have concluded that 1) I really hate being single, 2) I didn’t tell her how much I loved her enough, 3) I see no possible path to ever having serious female companionship again, and 4) it is amazing that I had the four serious romantic relationships I did have, since all of them were started by the women involved, because in that realm, I am and have always been the ultimate weenie.

The compensating factor is that I have known, admired and loved an amazing group of brilliant, talented, powerful, funny, strong, tough and challenging women over the years—my mother and younger sister qualify—and all of them either married someone else, or scared off men so much that they never married at all.

But enough whining: Last night I was musing about how to find more reliable, non-ideological news aggregators. There may not be any. Ann Althouse likes memeorandum, which I have come to realize is as partisan as the old Drudge Report. Mirabile dictu, I woke up this morning and without even searching for it, stumbled over an article from last spring titled, “10 Great News Aggregator Websites You Should Check Out in 2025.” I use some of them, including #10, which despite its ostentatious leftward bias is great source of marginal news, but I was not aware of many of the others, including The Morning News, #8.

Longtime reader Fred spent a couple years being my ethics story scout, and while many of you regularly send me links and suggested stories (and I am duly grateful), I’ve never felt like I have been close to covering my dauntingly vast (and important) topic since Fred went on other pursuits.

Now please, make some noise. I’ll be listening…

Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 4

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I like the show in general, but its writers need to catch up with the Rules of Professional Conduct and their interpretation.

Twenty years ago, in “The Sopranos,” Tony and his wife Carmella were having marital problems—gee , I wonder why?—and Tony was tipped off that she was looking for a divorce lawyer. So Tony contacted every major divorce lawyer he could find to tell them all about his marriage on the pretext that he was considering retaining one of them.. The idea was to conflict them all out of representing her, because they had received confidential communications from Tony.

Rule 1.18, relatively new at the time, held that lawyers had to keep the confidences of even potential clients, making such a dastardly tactic possible. But not long after that episode of “The Sopranos” revealed the loophole in the rules, courts and legal ethics opinions closed it with the sensible holding that someone only consulting a lawyer to create a conflict and not as a good faith effort to seek legal representation was not a genuine potential client.

Nevertheless, in the current season of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Mickey’s newly minted lawyer associate (and ex-wife) says she got her first family law client because the woman had been frozen out of hiring the established divorce lawyers after her louse of a spouse had pulled Tony’s old trick.

True, it’s not always easy to prove that an estranged spouse is seeking conflicts rather than a lawyer. Nonetheless, lawyer TV shows are ethically obligated not to deceive the public. Tony Soprano’s method is unlikely to work now, and hasn’t been viable for at least a decade.

In one area, “The Lincoln Lawyer” deserves praise for properly representing a lawyer’s duty that Hollywood almost always ignores. Whenever Mickey Haller, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” is presented with a plea deal or another offer from the opposing attorney, even if Mickey makes it clear that he thinks the offer is ridiculous, he always says, “I’ll run it by my client,” which he has to do. But even in some of the most celebrated legal films, like Paul Newman’s “The Verdict,” the lawyers don’t do that. As a result, many clients don’t know their attorney can’t reject or accept a settlement offer without consulting them. That misconception can cause real harm.

The previous installments of these legal ethics commentaries on the streaming series can be found here, here, and here.

Pre-Valentines Day and Lincoln’s Birthday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 12, 2026

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

My favorite Valentine’s Day memory comes from when I was a student at Harvard, directing my first show at nearby M.I.T. I had bemoaned to my cast how the holiday was bound to be a lonely one for me, as I had no girlfriend at the time and my room mates, who were all from far-flung states, where certain to be getting copious love notes in their mail boxes while mine would be, as usual, empty. (My home was in Arlington, Mass., a quick bus ride from Cambridge.) When February 14th arrived and the usual morning mail call with it, my room mate who was on mail duty that day announced, “Dick, you have eight cards. Slip, you have two. Mark, you got 12 cards. Worldman [he was Hawaiian], you also have 12. I have three, and Shithead (my room mates often called me “Shithead”) you have…these.”

And he poured out 58 little envelopes on the floor, each containing one of those little Valentines we used to exchange in elementary school. An M.I.T. coed named Nancy Green (not the original Aunt Jemima) in my chorus had persuaded every student in her dorm to write a personal message on one of those little cards, and she stamped, addressed and mailed them. It was a classic random act of kindness. Thanks, Nancy—wherever you are.

Meanwhile…

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Ethics Quiz: The I.C.E. Endorsement

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Sarai Jimenez, a special education teaching intern at in Pajaro Valley School District’s Watsonville, California-based MacQuiddy Elementary, endorsed the presence of I.C.E. officers in her town in a comment on Facebook last month.

“Yay!!! We need ICE in Watsonville!! It’s been getting out of hand,” Jimenez wrote, as you can see above. But the parents in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, where 84% of students are Hispanic and, given California’s sanctuary state aspirations, might belong to families with one or more illegal immigrants, considered Jimenez’s support for ICE….that is, enforcement of U.S. law…unconscionable. Many complained, and Jimenez was placed on leave from her job in Pajaro Valley School District. It appears that she will be fired, if she hasn’t been already.

“You can’t just tell the world how you feel and not expect repercussions from people because of how they feel about I.C.E.,” local parent Jorge Guerrero said. If I were awake completely, which I’m not, I would compose several alternate versions of this statement with provocative substitutes for “I.C.E.”

Jimenez tried to save her job by groveling a politician-style denial rather than an apology,“I’m sorry that the comment was taken out of context,” she told reporters. “But my actions speak so much louder than all those hateful bullies’ words.” The hateful bullies are the ones who bombarded her with threats and insults until she took down her Facebook page. “You are a shameful disgraceful disgusting woman,” one critic wrote.

Predictably, though apparently not by the interning teacher, the school administrators sided with the bullies if not their methods (although firing someone for supporting law enforcement is a lot more harmful than insulting her).

MacQuiddy Elementary Principal Sara Pearman said in a statement that Jimenez’s comment “does not reflect the values” of the school or district.

Hmmmm…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it ethical to fire Jimenez for expressing support for law enforcement officials doing their jobs?

I think this is a close call. Some points:

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