Month: August 2025

Harvard Is An Ethics Villain. The Trump Administration Is Finally Holding It Accountable.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

This is excellent.

The letter is hard to read, but a quick summary would be this: The Trump Administration is threatening to seize Harvard’s patents for discoveries and inventions developed with federal funds because Harvard failed to disclose them as required by law, commercialized them abroad before doing so in the U.S., or in other cases failed to convert them into practical use. The university, which has metastasized into an weapon of Leftist indoctrination and pursued the corruption and politicization of higher education for decades while using its aura of virtue and superiority as a shield against accountability, has been relying on the Axis of Unethical Conduct, notably the news media and its manipulation of public opinion, to insulate it from the Administration’s long-overdue intervention.

It chose…poorly.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Maluma

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here I am, with almost a dozen important ethics issues languishing thanks to my (I hope) temporary incapacity, picking the least consequential of them all to begin EA’s blogging day. Go figure.

Colombian rapper Maluma (whom I had never heard of before) halted his Mexico City concert to admonish an audience member who had brought a baby, presumably hers, to the event. He was in the middle of a song, in fact, when he noticed the infant in the audience and called out the woman.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this fucking high?” he asked. “That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here! Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility.”

Continue reading →

A Popular Culture Note…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

My energy and stamina are down, but I’m trying…and I’m going to indulge myself with a post that has little or no nexus to ethics. Based on album sales, these are the 50 best-selling music acts of all time.If you can’t guess #1, you are dangerously estranged from history and popular culture, which pings my “life competence” alarm. On other hand, if you guess #2, kudos.

Elvis is third.

It’s Time To Concede That The NYT Is Just A Partisan Propaganda Organ and Little Else

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Above is a Times front page in which the paper piled on to the international criticism of Israel in the Left’s “Think of the Children!” effort to blame Jews for the consequences of the war Hamas started and refuses to end.

“Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition,” the original caption to the photo said. Evil Israel is starving innocent children to death! Then, five days after the story was published, on July 29, the Times issued an editor’s note (buried at the bottom of the article) as well as a brief statement on its communications social media page that corrected its story, writing that it “had learned” that the child had underlying medical issues that affected his muscle development. Otherwise it did not retract any part of the feature, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” including its now especially dubious claim that the child was suffering from malnutrition due to food shortages.

Continue reading →

Was Jen Pawol the Most Qualified Umpire or Was She Just “Historic”?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Over the weekend, minor league umpire Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire in a Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of an Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader then moving behind the plate to call balls and strikes for Sunday’s game. Of course, MLB made a great hullabaloo over the momentous occasion. At various times during the season, minor league umpires are brought up to the big leagues to fill in for umpires getting their union-dictated vacations. Pawol is the only woman currently umpiring in the minor leagues. Thanks to baseball’s (and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s) wokeness obsession, she took her place in baseball history with a lingering and unavoidable doubt: would a man with her record and credentials have been chosen by MLB for the weekend umpiring chores? Were there more qualified and deserving male umpires who were passed over because they had y-chromosomes?

This is the scourge that the DEI fad has created. I feel sympathy for Pawol, but there is no avoiding it.

Naturally, MLB was ready for the questions and the suspicion. “Jen Pawol’s MLB debut is no PR stunt — she earned it the hard way” blared a Fox News headline, following an MLB press release. Methinks they doth protest too much. My suspicions were raised because just a few days earlier, the Boston Red Sox created team “history” by having an all-female broadcast team for a game. Why? Well, you know, because. The women were fine, professional play-by-play and color announcers, but nothing special except for their high voices. I’m sure there were plenty of long-time minor league male broadcasters who would have loved the chance to do a big league game, but, again, they wouldn’t be “historic,” so they were out of luck.

As with umpires, almost all baseball broadcasters are male and white. There’s no demonstrable discrimination at the heart of this: it’s self selection. Women don’t play hardball; blacks tend to be drawn to other sports as well. Why should that circumstance provide a special advantage to the minorities who do enter the field? Baseball doesn’t benefit from diversity of umpires: what matters is getting the calls right. Baseball fans want engaging, knowledgeable game broadcasts, and couldn’t care less about the sex and color of those providing it.

Meanwhile, there is still room for Manfred to carve out some more gratuitous history: baseball still hasn’t had a heterosexual female ump in the major leagues.

Comments of the Day: Point/Counterpoint on “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This post sparked several excellent comments, but the exchange between Holly A. and Cees Van Barnevelt was particularly outstanding. Holly’s comment was more political analysis than ethics (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but CVB’s response touched on two ethics issue that get short shrift today: 1) the fact that Donald Trump is indeed a patriot, is addressing matters as he promised to address them, 2) his popularity and power is mostly due to that, and not some kind of mindless cult of personality. (That was Obama.)

Here is Holly’s Comment of the Day on the post “Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?,” followed by CVB’s retort:

***

CVB: “My first question is what you mean about the Republicans unraveling today? I see the Trump administration getting quite a lot of work done, and fulfilling the promises made during the election. Are you referring to Congress?”

ME: Good question. I see the Democrats as unraveling externally, the Republicans as unraveling internally. Hence the disintegration of the former is easily observable, while the latter still looks quite sound. Congress has managed to pass legislation in record time and with a slim majority, which is a considerable feat! And yes, the Trump administration has also been busily at work with some clear accomplishments in line with campaign promises. What I see as the structural unraveling at the core of the GOP is the transformation of what used to be a party with a reasonably coherent set of values (as articulated by JM) into a personality/strongman cult in which loyalty/submission to the leader trumps adherence to values and attention to the priorities of their constituents. While they are in power, this looks like unity and strength. But what will things look like in the post-Trump era? Succession issues are one of the ways empires fall apart and companies fail. However, whether this supposition is correct will await the next chapter.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Teaching Constitutional Law

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is a bit different from the usual Ethics Alarms quiz.

Over at Dorf on Law, a site I had forgotten about, Eric Segal poses twenty questions about how Constitutional Law should be taught from this point going forward. They are:

Continue reading →

Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

On Martha’s Vineyard, food store proprietor named Krem Miskevich has told lawyer and Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowitz that he can’t buy his delicious pierogis because the liberal Democrat has periodically defended Donald Trump in various columns and bad people (like Jeffrey Epstein) in criminal cases. Dershowitz has previously complained bitterly about how his progressive neighbors on the picturesque Massachusetts island community have excluded him from the social life there because he is regarded as a traitor to the cause of knee-jerk wokism.

In addition to being an illiberal bully and an American devoid of core American values like pluralism and respect for free expression, Miskevich is an ignorant idiot who doesn’t comprehend the role of lawyers in a democracy. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Let me repeat that for any Miskeviches who might be drooling out there: Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Clarence Darrow didn’t approve of the character and conduct of child-killers Leopold and Loeb. John Adams did not endorse the conduct of the British soldiers who did the shooting in the Boston Massacre. This is enshrined in the lawyers’ Rules of Professional Conduct. It makes it possible for the 6th Amendment rights to a fair trial and legal representation to exist. Alan Dershowitz understands this. The pierogi-maker, a self-righteous fool, does not.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: At Least Two Dozen Federal Judges Who Don’t Get That “Appearance of Impropriety” Thingy

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I don’t have to exert myself much for this one…

Paul Caron reveals on his excellent Tax Prof Blog that a new report released today by Fix the Court documents how two dozen federal judges who teach at law schools went ahead and ruled in cases involving their law schools’ parent universities. Conflict? What conflict?

Multiple circuits (p. 12 in the report) and Judicial Conference policy (p. 11) have held that just because a judge teaches in one part of a university doesn’t mean that he or she will be biased in adjudicating a case in which that university is a party. Funny—most people, including most lawyers, would call this a slam dunk “appearance of impropriety” situation…because it is.

“This has conflict written all over it,” Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said. “If you teach at a law school, and especially if the law school is paying you, you shouldn’t be sitting on cases involving the university that the law school is a part of. Even if a judge-adjunct professes, as several have, that the law school at which they teach is but ‘one small and virtually autonomous part’ of the university, a neutral observer who sees ‘OSU Law’ on a judge’s disclosure would be correct in imputing bias any time that judge presides over a case involving Ohio State University.”

That seems pretty obvious to me, but then I’m just an ethicist and spend way to much time pondering such matters.

The recent attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court for not having an enforceable code of conduct and ethics neatly distracts from the widespread corruption in the rest of the judiciary, as highlighted by the recent wave of partisan judges working with the Axis of Unethical Conduct to hamstring Trump Administration policies. Judges are more poorly trained in judicial ethics than lawyers are in legal ethics. Elected judges are partisan by design; too many judges are well-past their shelf life, and DEI mania since 2020 has loaded the judiciary with too many robed ones whose primary qualifications for the bench are immutable biological features.

The judiciary is yet another rotting institution that needs serious reform and fast—as if we didn’t have enough to worry about already.

Well, Crap…Here’s Another Open Forum. I’m Sorry.

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

My Saturday mission is to get two posts up by 10:20 am, E.S.T. So much for that. I had a bad night with my leg, which is now sitting undressed with the 4″ X 2″ giant infected wound looking less inflamed but still feeling sore. I’m trying to type on a new laptop that is driving me crazy, while a traumatized pit bull lies happily snoring on my other leg. Everything is taking me five times longer than usual, and the usual WordPress quirks that are just irritating under normal conditions now prompt me to scream a versatile epithet so loudly that my house guest keeps running over to see if I’m all right.

I hate this.

EA is blessed to have so many sharp, erudite, informed an creative participants in the commentariate (Curmie, Curmie, wherefore art thou, Curmie?) that I know this space will be well used, so I know I’m leaving the blog in good hands, but still. There is so much I want to post about, and I expected to be much closer to normal by now.

Well, enough self-flagellation. Go do that voodoo that you do so well.