May 29 is the anniversary of the moment when, at 11:30 a.m. in 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, became the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the exclamation mark of Hillary’s remarkable and ethically admirable life. He was the first admittee into The Ethics Alarms Hall of Heroes as an Ethics Hero Emeritus. His story is republished (from the defunct but still available Ethics Scoreboard), here.
1. About that cartoon…Ethics Alarms mentioned the hypocrisy of the despicable Memorial Day Weekend cartoon inflicted on the nation by the Washington Post, which ham-handedly compared Republicans to fascists authoritarians. Authoritarians hold power by fearmongering and falsehoods, and any defender of cartoonist Ann Telnaes‘s juvenile drawing (using the hallowed graves at Arlington National Cemetery as a cheap prop) will have to explain away Chuck Schumer’s nicely-timed slap at the single branch of the government which currently stands in the way of the numerous Biden Administration incursions on the Constitution. In Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court unanimously held that the EPA had exceeded its authority (as a part of the executive branch, that means the Biden Administration) by forbidding an Idaho couple from building on their build on land near Priest Lake under the Clean Water Act. The court said that the land does not constitute a wetland under the CWA, and made it crystal clear that the words of the statute demanded that decision. Yet even though the decision was unanimous, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader attacked the decision this way on Twitter: “This MAGA Supreme Court is continuing to erode our country’s environmental laws. Make no mistake—this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands. We’ll keep fighting to protect our waters.” Two Obama appointees and Biden’s SCOTUS appointee joined in the ruling, but Democrats want to represent the unanimous decision as “MAGA.” In this case, at least, it was—if MAGA means not allowing the government to break laws and exceed its authority because it has decided it’s for “the greater good.” The White House also attacked the decision, neatly avoiding the matter of all 9 justices concluding that the EPA was violating the law and infringing on the property rights of American citizens. “It puts our Nation’s wetlands – and the rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds connected to them – at risk of pollution and destruction, jeopardizing the sources of clean water that millions of American families, farmers, and businesses rely on,” wrote Joe’s puppeteers. It’s all Trump’s fault! These MAGA fanatics like Justice Sotomayor seem to think that the government, which knows best, should follow laws before doing by edict what it deems wise!
2. And a little bit more...I had forgotten that Telnaes had been highlighted in Ethics Alarms before, when she drew a cartoon in 2015 representing Senator Ted Cruz’s two daughters, then 4 and 7, as monkeys. Telnaes defended the cartoon (yeah—imagine if a political cartoonist had done the same with Barack Obama’s daughters) but eventually the Post removed it (and her defense) from its website. Yet somehow, that episode wasn’t enough to tip off the Post that she had wretched judgment.
3. Wow, that chatbot is exactly like a real lawyer! I had a technology and legal ethics seminar postponed last week because not enough lawyers registered. I could have kept at least one of them from future embarrassment if I had held the seminar a month ago: on my agenda was the experience of a local lawyer with ChatGPT, who, as an experiment, asked the newly hot AI program to write a legal memo on Maryland law. He got a very well-written and reasoned response back, with one teeny problem: all of the cases the bot cited were made up. The lawyer was kind enough to send the memo, with his comments, to his favorite legal ethicist.
Then came this news in Judge Kevin Castel (S.D.N.Y.)’s May 4 order in Mata v. Avianca, Inc.:
“The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance. A submission filed by plaintiff’s counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases. When the circumstance was called to the Court’s attention by opposing counsel, the Court issued Orders requiring plaintiff’s counsel to provide an affidavit annexing copies of certain judicial opinions of courts of record cited in his submission, and he has complied. Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations. Set forth below is an Order to show cause why plaintiff’s counsel ought not be sanctioned.”
The court ordered plaintiff’s counsel to show cause why he shouldn’t be sanctioned and plaintiff’s counsel filed an affidavit in response, explaining that he was relying on the work of another lawyer at his firm, and the other lawyer also filed an affidavit, explaining that he was relying on ChatGPT, but hadn’t had the time or inclination to check the cases cited.
New York and Florida are, so far, the only states that require lawyers to take CLE courses on legal technology. [I originally left out Florida. Thanks to reader Hal Morlan for the alert.] Meanwhile, I have been told by many lawyers that they are used to receiving memoranda and briefs from opposition lawyers that include either non-existent cases or cases that don’t say what the lawyers claim they say. So ChatGPT knows how to imitate real life unethical lawyers….[Pointer: Sarah B.]
4. Oh yeah, this will work out well…speaking again of government over-reach. New York City’s Democratic Mayor Eric Adams signed a bill last week outlawing discrimination based on weight and height in employment, housing and public accommodations.
“I’m a person that believes in health, so when you talk about not discriminating against someone because of their body type, it’s not fighting against obesity; it’s just being fair,” he said. “So I think this is the right thing to do. We’re going to continue to talk about our progressive health agenda. Science has shown body type is not a connection to if you’re healthy or unhealthy, and I think that’s a misnomer we are really dispelling.”
Great: a progressive health agenda.
Watch the lawsuits stream in filed by aspiring fat strippers, waitresses, police officers and actors. You know what’s next on this slippery slope: “lookism.” Favoring attractive people over the less attractive will be illegal for TV news-readers, models and Rockettes. Where the DEI madness stops, nobody knows….
5. “Jane, you ignorant slut….”…I would normally excuse her stupid and unethical blathering as dementia, but she was like this when she was 30. In an interview with Deadline, octogenarian actress Jane Fonda, now sporting purple hair on a head that has had more surgery than Frankenstein’s monster…
- Implied that Robert Redford is gay because he didn’t like kissing her…
- Impugned the current appearance of former so-star Alain Delon (who has NOT had more surgery than Frankenstein’s monster…
- And best of all, said this…
We’ve got about seven, eight years to cut ourselves in half of what we use of fossil fuels…It is a tragedy that we have to absolutely stop. We have to arrest and jail those men [responsible for the crisis] — they’re all men…there would be no climate crisis if there was no racism. There would be no climate crisis if there was no patriarchy. A mindset that sees things in a hierarchical way…White men are the things that matter and then everything else [is] at the bottom….So when I say that I’m fighting the climate crisis, I also feel that I’m fighting patriarchy and racism. It’s important because we have to get out of the silos — feminists over here, environmentalists over here. That’s what I learned when I started being an activist around the Vietnam War. The more you go down any issue, whatever it is, you realize that it’s all connected. And if we solve the climate crisis and we haven’t solved those other things, we’re gonna be in trouble.”
Yes, friends, this is an icon of progressivism, feminism, and the environmental movement: a bigoted, ignorant, hateful victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Ethics Alarms 
1. The Court found the property in question was not connected to a wetlands. A road cut the property off years ago. This case went on for twenty years. Inexcusable. The Bush and Trump administrations were evidently unable to sort this out? I guess the EPA is too full of zealots.
5. Translation: Hey hey, ho ho, all white men have got to go.
WordPress is back to not allowing me to comment on my own posts directly, so I’ll piggy-back on yours: I wonder if “Jane you ignorant slut” is not recognizable to non-boomers. It was, of course, a running gag on Saturday Night Live in its “Point/Counterpoint” parody, which was a big hit in the initial year of the show. But yikes, that was more than 40 years ago!
Jane Curtin. When SNL was actually funny. We date ourselves almost every time we open our mouths.
I didn’t recognize it. But I plugged the phrase into YouTube and got this lovely gem:
One of the best of them! And it’s still funny. The 60 Minute combatants SNL was mocking were grumpy old conservative James J. Kilpatrick and knee-jerk liberal Shana Alexander, both of whom are largely forgotten today. And rightly so….
3. During my second-year summer clerkship, I attended a hearing on a zoning case with one of the litigation partners. During the oral arguments, I pretty quickly concluded one, if you say something, a judge might believe it, two, if you write it down, the judge is even more likely to believe it, three, if you attach a cite to a case, you’re more than likely home free.
Sure, a little over the top, but still….
Regarding Number 3, a lawyer on a criminal list Serb in my state posted about his encounter with AI.
He asked it a question about searches (or something). It spit out some articulate answer that was incorrect. It may have even cited an actual case (for an erroneous proposition). When this erro was pointed out the AI apologized, corrected itself and went on to provide further (incorrect) analysis of the question. This was pointed out again. Another apology followed, along with more faulty analysis. I do not recall how many times this exercise was repeated, but it was very enlightening, both for us and, presumably, the AI.
-Jut
5. Seven or eight years? I thought Al Gore said the seas would be boiling by now. How many tipping points and deadlines have we already blown through? I bet Vietnam is one hundred percent renewable, right Jane? Wait, wasn’t Ho a, wait for it, guy?
1. Property owners in my area know that if they spot a cattail sprouting in a wet spot in a hayfield, they’d better dig it up and dispose of it pronto. God forbid that the environmental Karen’s notify the EPA that you’re plowing under a cattail patch, or you’ll have a lot of ‘splaining to do. A lot of these properties are only “wet” a couple of months of the year, not true wetlands by any stretch of the rational imagination.
3. I read recently about an academic who asked ChatGPT to find research references on a topic. Fully 80% of them were totally fabricated but presented as legitimate peer-reviewed papers.
My comment in reference to item #1 above should not be construed to minimize the similar and likely more common intrusions against property rights by state-level clean water and “conservation” groups and the zealots who often populate them. My state’s department of environment and conservation periodically has to be reined in by the legislature and the courts. Also the various state and local “planning and development” agencies and their ability to impose harsh land use restrictions, and even effect imminent domain processes, must also be kept on a short leash.
“intrusions against property rights by state-level clean water and ‘conservation’ groups and the zealots who often populate them.”
If you ever desire further documented proof of just how “infiltrated” the groups you reference really are, pick up Elizabeth Nickson’s Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage
3. Not only does ChatGPT make up the law for lawyers it makes up stuff about lawyers too.
BTW I got my invite to buy my way onto that best attorney’s list to be published in the NY Times that Jack wrote about some couple of weeks ago where invitees were picked by some computer algorithm allegedly listed in some long expired provisional patent application.
Since I am not a U.S. attorney, it was more than a little surprising.