One of the main occupational hazards of being an ethicist and writing this blog is that my ethics Spidey-sense can’t be turned off. This is why anything from TV commercials to an old re-run of “Three’s Company” to a kid leaving an e-scooter by the side of the road can trigger an ethical analysis. This is not a fun way to go through life, but “this is the life I have chosen.”

It may be that the passage in the Georgetown Law Center alumni magazine started my head clanging like the crocodile’s in “Peter Pan” when the alarm clock he swallowed goes off wouldn’t have bothered me if I had I not just reviewed all the unethical quotes of 2023 an hour before reading “AI and the Law” in the Fall 2023 issue (which just arrived last week, a full season late). I don’t think so, however. Here it is:

“Students might well use the [AI]technology to cheat, but at this point stopping them is difficult….And in any case, students have always cheated; in a way, AI may even help level the playing field. ‘AI puts kids who don’t have Uncle Alito to call for help with their take-home exam on an equal footing with those who do,’ says [Prof. Frances] DeLaurentis.”

And voila! The first triple discredit for a single unethical quote in Ethics Alarms history! Congratulation to Prof. DeLaurentis, who teaches legal writing at GULC, Beiser, who wrote the article, and the magazine staff that allowed it in print.

The worst of the three is DeLaurentis, who concocted an ominous and significant “Everybody does it” rationalization to excuse law students cheating. A cheating student will be an unqualified graduate, and an unqualified graduate in likely to be a lousy lawyer. In addition, a lawyer who cheated in law school is not likely to shrink from cheating in the practice of law to “level the playing field.”

That metaphor is hardly shocking coming from a law school professor, given the breed’s almost unanimous embrace of affirmative action and DEI as nostrums for society’s ills. It is nauseating nonetheless. What else will such a professor justify in the pursuit of “leveling the playing field”? DeLaurentis’s gratuitous shot at progressive beta noire Justice Alito is a tell—Surprise! She’s a partisan progressive hack!— as well as an unfair and disrespectful insult. How does she know Alito would knowingly help a law student cheat on an exam? Oh, come on, isn’t it obvious? He’s a conservative jurist who authored the Dobbs decision, so he must be dishonest too!

What else, I wonder, would a professor who makes that statement justify to “level the playing field”? Surely Georgetown’s black students should get a little boost in their grades, since they have been laboring their whole lives under the burdens of “systemic racism.” Maybe she thinks it’s fair for black students and women to use artificial intelligence to succeed on take-home exams, while the white males should be forced to take the test without assistance. After all, women and minorities are always fighting an uphill battle against the white supremacy patriarchy—or so the majority of most faculties assume.

It’s funny, though, that a Georgetown law professor doesn’t appear to have any concern about the playing field for those students who don’t call up “Uncle Alito” and don’t use an AI take-home test aide because they think cheating of any kind is wrong. In March of this year, I wrote about my personal experience at Georgetown Law Center with a self-timed take-home exam that I took as directed and received a lower grade because so many in the class cheated. Like DeLaurentis, the professor reacted to my complaint with infuriating indifference.

Well, I guess it’s good to know that the school hasn’t changed.

Next in the quote miscreant line-up is the author of the piece, Vince Beiser. He’s a free-lance journalist, and has no law degree. That explains his “students have always cheated” shrug. Few journalists today have ethics alarms, and most seemingly regard “everybody does it” as a persuasive argument. But why is a non-lawyer given the assignment to write about artificial intelligence and the law by a law school communicating with its lawyer alumni? Surely there must be law grads who would be able to explore the topic with more nuance and perspective.

I ask this is as the person who started the law school’s alumni magazine, and edited its very first issue. Then (and for a couple of decades after) it was called “Res Ipsa Loquitur.”

….which brings me to the magazine staff. How could it be that nobody in the editing and publication process realized that the unethical quote above rationalizes cheating while also impugning the integrity of a Supreme Court Justice?

I’ll tell you how: it happened because bias makes you stupid, and because the Georgetown law school alumni magazine is edited and primarily staffed by non-lawyers. The editor-in-chief is a literature major, who, for all I know, isn’t aware that it is a serious legal ethics violation for a lawyer to engage in misrepresentation, dishonesty, fraud or deceit.

Like cheating.