Japanese tycoon Terrance Watanabe gambled away nearly $127 million at the Caesar’s Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, and now is suing the casinos even as he faces criminal charges for refusing to pay them over $15 million in additional debts. He claims that the gambling establishments allowed him to gamble while intoxicated in violation of state casino regulations, and otherwise share blame for his outlandish losses, believed to be the most any gambler has amassed in a single year. Continue reading
Month: December 2009
The Leaked Exam: Teaching Ethics Unethically
Some University of Oregon law students preparing for exams when the full text of an exam for one of their classes, Administrative Law with Professor John Bonine, inexplicably appeared on a university list-serve. Someone in the registrar’s office had pushed the wrong button.
Oops! Yay? Uhhh…now what? Continue reading
Law Students, Lawyers and Judges With Broken Ethics Alarms, 2009
I won’t keep you in suspense: my favorite is the Harvard law school whiz who celebrated his job offer from a top law firm by getting drunk and burning down a church. Forgot to check the batteries in the ol’ ethics alarm, I guess!
Here are two cautionary end-of-year lists: from the Avvo blog, the “Top Lawyers Behaving Badly” list for 2009, and, though not rich a source for black humor, the even more disturbing “Year’s Most Infamous Lawyers” from the Business Insider.
Ethics Alarms thanks Robert Ambrogi for finding them, as well the Avvo and the Business Insider for doing such an excellent job of compiling them.
Ethics Dunce: Sen. Charles Shumer
It’s a minor news event with a couple of ethics lesson, but as usual, the media’s focus is on the wrong one.
New York’s U.S. Senators, Gillibrand and Shumer, were talking away on their cell phones before take-off. The flight attendants announced, as they have been doing on flights since before Cher’s first retirement tour, that it was time to ditch the electronic devices and turn off the cell phones. The senators ignored the instructions, and kept talking anyway, because, you know, their work is So Very Important. Continue reading
Self-Castration Ethics
Ouch.
A Colombian man whose wife refused to have sexual relations with him castrated himself to remove any temptation to become the next Tiger Woods.
This is in some ways admirable, don’t you think? Continue reading
When Money Curdles Ethics
A stimulating ethics alarm drill surfaced over at Freakonomics, where Stephen Dubner challenged the site’s readers to help him compile a list of goods, services and activities that one can legally give away or perform gratis, but that when money changes hands, the transactions become illegal. It is a provocative exercise, especially when one ponders why the addition of money should change the nature of the act from benign to objectionable in the view of culture, society, or government. It is even more revealing to expand the list to include uses of money that may not create illegality, but which change an act from ethical to unethical. Continue reading
An Ethical Compromise on Climate Change Policy?
A Canadian economist, Dr. Ross McKittrick, has written a paper suggesting that carbon emission penalties be set to rise or fall according to climate indicators. He wants to tie carbon penalties to the temperature of the lowest layer of the atmosphere —the troposphere, which extends from the surface of the earth to a height of about 10 miles. His paper advocates using temperature readings near the equator, because that is where the global warming models forecast the greatest increases. Continue reading
Save Lindsay Lohan
It’s interesting, isn’t it? People who would never think of ridiculing the sick or mentally ill, who would never dream of condemning emotionally crippled individuals broken by dysfunctional families, will gleefully heap public abuse on a celebrity with the same problems. Why is this? A human being in trouble is a human being in trouble. It seems, however, that with the exception of little girls who fall down wells, the more people who know you are in crisis, the less sympathy you are likely to get.
Take, for example, the sad case of actress Lindsay Lohan, a talented young woman cursed with two narcissistic and exploitive parents. Continue reading
Ethics Heroes, Holiday Division: The Philly Mystery Diners
Ethics Newsline reported a story that we almost missed: a mysterious anonymous couple ate breakfast at the Aramingo Diner in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia, and paid for both their meal and that of the diners at a table next to them. Their spontaneous act of generosity set off a “pay it forward” chain reaction worthy of Haley Joel Osment that had one waitress crying tears of joy. For the next five hours, everybody paid someone else’s check, “paying it forward,” with no concern about the price of the meals involved.
Was it just a group of people who decided to act out a scene from a Christmas movie Frank Capra forgot to make? Did it only happen because the diner had reasonably priced meals? Was the whole thing staged by some street theater group?
Let’s hope it was not a stunt, and that the experience of being nice to strangers for no reason other than that it’s a good habit to have will last longer than the family Christmas tree.
As for the Mystery Couple—Ethics Heroes for sure—good work, and Merry Christmas!
Post Office Ethics: A Nightmare Come True
The Bad news: overworked Connecticut postal workers have been hiding mail
The Worse news: there’s no way of knowing whether this is just happening in Connecticut, or everywhere, but my guess is that it isn’t just Connecticut.
The Worst news: the story says that the head of the postal union got “the assurance it wouldn’t happen again.” This suggests that postal workers who have been hiding the mail still have their jobs.
If hiding the U.S. mail isn’t a firing offense for postal workers, what is? Could there be a greater breach of professional ethics?
Ethics Alarms 