Author: Jack Marshall

What Would We Do Without “Experts”?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Over the last two days, the listserv of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL) had been embroiled in a debate over ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 3.10 and its application to a hypothetical posed by a member. The association, which I belong to, includes law professors, ethics partners, CLE trainers, and ethics consultants, expert witnesses—pretty much all of the legal ethics experts in the United States.

There is no ABA Model Rule 3.10.

Eventually, after a lot of replies, someone figured out that the question really involved California’s Rule 3.10, which neither the ABA nor any other jurisdiction includes. The big clue was that the member who posted the hypothetical practices in California, though the state was not mentioned in the original post. Most of the responses to the post were also California lawyers, none of whom mentioned that this was an issue confined to their state.

Question: are these legal ethics experts unaware that the rule in their state is an outlier? Or is the Golden State such an impenetrable bubble that legal ethics experts there assume that its often bizarre sensitivities are the only ones that count?

[Perhaps relevant (or not): the lawyer who started the debate over the almost imaginary ethics rule includes mandatory pronouns in each post.]

Comment of the Day: Comment of the Day: “Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well this is embarrassing. Not only have I been four days late in posting Tom P’s Comment of the Day, I also left Tom out of last night’s comment of my own listing the “five commenters” that a bitter reader had claimed was the total commentariate here, as I counted up the names of recent commenters, missing at least three, including Tom. (The total is currently 25. You know, as in “five.” I didn’t even count EA comment bomber “A Friend,” since he’s the equivalent of an illegal immigrant here).

Here is Tom’s excellent and well-researched Comment of the Day on the post [ A COTD by Extradimensional Cephalopod] , “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”.…

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EC’s closing observation is spot on.

“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy, but it sounds like he’s yet another politician pandering to people’s biases to seize power.”

Whatever label you pin on Mamdani, communist or socialist, is irrelevant. It has been said that the only difference between the two ideologies is the speed and number of bodies that pile up. Both systems are anti-capitalist and have no respect for individual property rights. Mamdani is using the same playbook that the Democrats have used since FDR. Buying votes with the promise of free stuff.

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So What’s With The “Groypers”?

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

I guess because I regard podcasts as a waste of time, the term “Groyper” was happily outside my consciousness until very recently. The main reason I encountered it at all was the latest Tucker Carlton controversy that metastasized into a big PR problem for the Heritage Foundation. Tucker—note please that Ethics Alarms identified him as a principle-free, self-aggrandizing, cynical Ethics Villain years ago, even before his Fox News stardom: See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”—has been cozying up to Hitler apologists, Holocuast-deniers, anti-Semites and white supremacists because, as usual, he’s decided that its where the clicks and “likes” lie among the easily fooled and ignorant. After he had a slobbering interview with white supremacist (above) Nick Fuentes (whose followers call themselves “Groypers“), Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, posted a disgaceful video on social media praising and defending the creep (I mean Carlson in this case) while using terms that sounded like anti-Semitic dog-whistles.

I should have posted on it, but I wrongly assumed Roberts would have been forced to resign by now. The board of Heritage should get cracking: one thing conservatives, Republicans and MAGA do not need is for the #1 conservative think tank to be perceived as backing fascists (referring to Fuentes this time) and lying assholes (back to Tucker).

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Write Your Own Ethics Movie Treatment In Today’s Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The condign justice article in the New York Times right now is the news about how badly comedies and drama are doing at the movie box office. Good. Hollywood deserves it, and has for a while. The gift link is here, but the article is biased and incompetent. When the Times gets around to theorizing about why this is happening, guess what it omits?

The Wuhan Virus freakout and lockdown, which Hollywood’s wildly woke pals in the news media, the medical profession, the teachers’ unions and in government agencies inflicted on the nation and the culture. Ending the important social binding function of shared audience experiences is just one of the collateral catastrophes the mass, partially politically-motivated fearmongering created.

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Late Ethics Tidbits…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Well, having posted one brief ethics note not typically worthy of a full post, here are some more that just popped up…

1. On season two of “Broadchurch,” a quirky Netflix British drama that ran three seasons, there is an exchange in which a criminal defense attorney (that is, a barrister) in an intense and controversial trial excoriates her assistant by saying, “If you were doing your job, we’d have a chance at getting our client off!”

That is unethical and a false characterization of the defense’s job. It is also, I fear, what most people think the defense is trying to do.

A defense attorney’s job in a criminal trial is to ensure that the prosecution proves the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the assessment of the jury. It is not to get a guilty criminal “off.” It’s a subtle distinction but a crucial one. Every defendant deserves a fair trial, which means a competent, vigorous defense, so that if he or she is ultimately found guilty, due process has been served.

The defense attorney’s mission is to make the prosecution fulfill its mission. When the prosecution’s argument fails because the defense demonstrated that the case wasn’t clearly presented or strong enough, that is entirely the prosecution’s fault. If, despite a vigorous and zealous defense a defendant is convicted by a competent jury, the ethical defense attorney should feel satisfied. An attorney who is elated that she got a guilty defendant “off” is in the wrong profession. She did her job, but the prosecution didn’t, and the result, while the right one, is nothing to celebrate.

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Office Decor Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The lab where I go to get my bloodwork, Sunrise Labs in Arlington, Virginia on Carlin Springs Road, has a spare, gray waiting room. There is only a single decoration: a framed color photograph of gravestones.

I kid you not, as Jack Paar used to say.

“The Dishonest Waiter” Strikes Again…and Again…and Again…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I have referenced the parable of “The Dishonest Waiter” here several times after first encountering it in the film, “Denial.” The point is that when a waiter gives you the wrong change it can be presumed to be a simple innocent mistake, but when all of the waiter’s “mistakes” go in one direction, to his own financial benefit, one can no longer give such a waiter the benefit of the doubt: he’s dishonest, and those weren’t mistakes. Ethics Alarms finds the Axis news media as a perfect equivalent of the Dishonest Waiter now: all of their “mistakes” go to the disadvantage of Donald Trump and his party. Those who insist, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias,” I fear, are as dishonest as the metaphorical waiter.

Our Dishonest Waiters has been a busy bee lately. A few examples among many more…

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The Democratic Shutdown Was 100% Unethical: Let’s See If The Axis News Media Succeeds in Blaming It On Trump and Republicans…

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Then, you see, in Axis of Unethical Conduct Land, the disastroud, doomed to fail shutdown was ethical because “it worked.” The Harry Reid Principle (“Romney lost, didn’t he?”).

“Why did you decide to vote with Republicans to open the government?” Joe Scarborough (on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”) asked “Independent” Senator Angus King (of Maine), who is a Democrat without the guts to admit it.

“Well, Joe, you have to go back to what the strategy was at the beginning of the shutdown,” King answered. “There were two goals, both of which I support. One was standing up to Donald Trump. The other was getting some resolution on the ACA premium tax credit issue. The problem was, the shutdown wasn’t accomplishing either goal. And there was practically, well, it was zero likelihood that it was going to.”

And there you have it! The Democrats were willing to harm the economy, government employees, the poor, federal workers and more to “stand up” to Trump, meaning that the shutdown had as much validity as the “No Kings” rallies and the Trump Deranged who gathered for a primal scream at the sky. The ACA premium tax credit issue had already been resolved, but the Democrats, who ironically enough, no longer support democracy, didn’t like the way it was resolved by an elected majority.

King caucuses with the Democrats; he knows what they talked about. Like any good totalitarians, which is what they have become, the entire party with a few outliers like Senator Fetterman, is counting on a captive, Pravda-style news media to mislead the public so they blame President Trump and Republicans for the damage they did unilaterally.

I wonder if they’ll get away with it…

Ethics Quiz of the Day: Mencken-Style Ad Hominem

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

At the Washiungton Free Beacon, columnist Andrew Stiles writes,

Jack Schlossberg, the sentient boat shoe and semi-employed TikTok user, is running for Congress in New York. It was bound to happen. The 32-year-old Democrat belongs to the Kennedy dynasty—that inexplicably beloved menagerie of goon-faced Habsburgian freaks, Nantucket douche bros, chronic alcoholics, and bloated sex pests. Schlossberg, a mentally deranged internet addict who cracks jokes about guzzling “Jew blood” and “male jizz,” has sought to inject the storied Kennedy brand with Gen Z flare.

That anti-Kennedy invective made me laugh out loud more than once. But is it fair commentary to mix in so much ad hominem invective in an opinion column if it is genuinely funny, at least to a substantial number of readers (or listeners)?

Famous (or infamous) journalist-pundit H.L. Mencken (1880-1956, above) excelled at this sort of thing; he may have even invented it. Here is part of his “obituary” for three-time (losing) Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan after he died shortly after he faced off against Clarence Darrow in Dayton, Tennessee in Tennessee v. Scopes aka, “Monkey Trial”:

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The Duty To Remember: Jan Ernst Matzeliger, Inventor, (1852-1889)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This kind of thing drives me crazy, as regular and long-time readers here know. The culture and society lose so much when important events, figures and trailblazers are gradually lost—forgotten, ignored, erased by ignorance and apathy. That this remarkable and important inventor somehow fell into the memory hole of American history is particularly galling because he was black, and black activists have gone to extreme lengths, at times manufacturing significant black historical figures out of otherwise marginal accomplishments, to show the contributions of African Americans to U.S. society and culture. Jan Ernst Matzeliger was a big deal. We should know his name.

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