Author: Jack Marshall

Ethics Alarms Encore: “Possessed Lawyer Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The best legal ethics story I have ever heard and probably ever will hear arose in Arizona in 2010. I have regaled CLE seminars with it many times since, and it is ever green. After I mentioned the case again today at a Federal Bar convention program, I found myself wondering if I had ever posted about the weird episode on Ethics Alarms. Indeed I had, but it was way back in September of 2010.Here’s how long ago that was: Instagram didn’t yet exist, the statement that Donald Trump would be the next President might get you committed, and the only commenter on the post was “JJ,” whom I have completely forgotten.

Clearly, it’s time for an encore, so here it is, slightly expanded.

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Is it unethical for a lawyer to claim she is possessed by a client’s dead wife?

This  question has been puzzling professional responsibility experts for decades. Okay, not really. In fact, surprisingly, it just doesn’t happen all that often. But in Arizona, a lawyer is now facing suspension for claiming that she was possessed by the spirit of a client’s dead wife, then lying about it under oath. The dead wife is being accused of illegal immigration.

OK, I made up that part, too.

Sorry.

The ABA Journal reports that the lawyer, Charna Johnson, began representing a client during his divorce proceedings. While the divorce was in process,  the client’s wife, who was fighting many demons even before she got in the possession business, committed suicide. Johnson then represented the husband in probate proceedings, but one day became convinced, according to her sworn testimony and that of two witnesses, that the client’s wife had possessed her, like that real demon, Pazuzu. Continue reading →

Note To Gov. DeSantis: The Tampa Bay Rays Are Not The Same As Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I defended Gov. Ron DeSantis’s cancellation of Disney’s long-standing special status with the state of Florida, because, ethically, partners shouldn’t publicly attack partners without consequences, and because Disney’s privilege of self-government was in great part a product of the company bolstering core American values and a family-friendly culture. No, I pointed out more than once, this was not a case of a corporation being singled out to be punished for a political position the state opposed, but a situation where special benefits could no longer be justified if Disney was no longer going to hold up its end of the original mutually-beneficial deal of yore, which could be reasonably seen as “You don’t meddle in our business, and we won’t meddle in yours.” Moreover, giving Disney special benefits that other theme parks in the state didn’t have could not be justified as fair and reasonable any longer.

It now appears that I may have been giving Gov. DeSantis more credit than he deserved, and that his slap at Disney was, at least in part, an example of a state government punishing a company for a political position it had every right to hold, state, and act upon. Yesterday we learned that DeSantis intends to veto a $35 million bill for Florida to pay for a Pasco County facility that would serve as for the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training home. The reason is, apparently, the baseball team’s public message above.

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Georgetown Law Center Finally Reinstated Ilya Shapiro. Big Whoop! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Yesterday, after a 122-day punitive investigation into a 45-word tweet, Georgetown University Law Center finally reinstated Ilya Shapiro as the senior lecturer and executive director for the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. It should not take a four-month investigation to reinstate a faculty member for clearly-protected political expression, even had his controversial tweet not been self-evidently true, which it was. But that’s Georgetown for you.
Way back in January, Ethics Alarms first reported on this embarrassment to my law school alma mater and former employer. Following President Biden’s woke-pandering pledge to appoint a black woman to fill a looming vacancy on the Supreme Court, Shapiro issued a sharp tweet opining that restricting the choice of justices by race and gender was not the best way to identify the most qualified or experienced jurist. For this he was called a racist by the Law Center’s dean, and suspended. I followed the episode (with disgust) in several posts: exploring the unethical conduct of Dean Treanor, regarding a letter of protest signed by many law school professors (but none from GULC); on the alumni and student protest led by Luke Bunting; and cheering Federal Judge Ho’s support for Shapiro in an address at the law school.

Ethics Clean-Up On Aisle Thursday, 6/2/2022: An All-Stupid Tag Team Event!

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

What a mess!

I watched the controversial Netflix Ricky Gervais special. I find Gervais funny but tiresome after a while, and a lot of the jokes are cheap: taking dumb tweets from his detractors and highlighting what’s dumb about them is the epitome of low-hanging fruit, for example. Are his jokes about trans individuals hateful and “dangerous”? If you claim to be woman and have a penis, I think at very least you are obligated to appreciate the opportunity for ironic and absurdist humor, and Gervais’s mockery of the pronouns battle is both funny and illuminating.

His most provocative comment is at the very end, as he defends humor in general against the assault of the offended. He’s a joke absolutist, which I question ethically, but his tale about he and his brother making a pact that if they ever thought of a remark that was funny, they would say it, “win, lose or draw,’ with no self-censorship has me intrigued. His reasoning is that humor serves as a balm for humanity, and there is a net loss if fear of one person’s negative reaction kills an unborn joke that might cheer, and uplift the spirits of others. At it core, this is a utilitarian argument.

1. When the only tool you have is a hammer... NYC City Councilwoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who represents neighborhoods in Brooklyn, shot off this tweet:

What a bigot! What an idiot! She was so sure a white guy did the killing that she tweeted this without even checking, and sure enough, he was black. She’s the epitome of the current knee-jerk strategy of her party in response to virtually everything now. (Did I mention her party? Did I need to?)

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I Think We Can Safely Conclude That This Was Unethical…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In Brazil, a culture where respect for women is comparable to the U. S. in the early 19th Century, Gabriel Coelho forced Tayane Caldas, his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend, into his car as she was walking home from school.  He drove her to his home, and the 20-year-old Coelho then tattooed his full name on the girl’s face, as you can see above. Coelho claims that Tayane consented.

So I guess she wants to get back together with him…

Actually, that seems unlikely. For one thing, she had requested and received two restraining orders against Coelho, one in 2021 and another this year.  Still, Tayane’s mother had to encourage her daughter to press charges against her ex-boyfriend, as she was initially inclined to simply hide her new face tattoo with make-up. The fact that she even was thinking this way shows how primitive female self-esteem can be in Brazil.

Gabriel Coelho is under arrest, though his father backs his ridiculous defense that she consented to be branded. Of course he does. Men like Gabriel don’t turn out believing women are property without a role model.

If The Last Post (About Emerson College Promoting Anti-White Racism) Bothered You, Samuel L. Jackson Has A Suggestion Before You Read This One…[UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

In Illinois, Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. Let me repeat that…

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will now require teachers to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

This is called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading.” It’s transformative, all right. It is a great way to transform black students into societal cripples who cannot master what many behavioral scientists believe are the most crucial skills for life success, because they are given an institutional pass.

This ridiculous and divisive concept is, of course, yet another effort to eliminate persistent discrepancies between racial groups by pretending that they are caused by racism, and lowering standards so everyone has an equally low bar to clear.  OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionately hurt the grades of black students, like for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in  assignments. This will, you know—don’t they know?—set up black students to skip work, misbehave in other settings, and fail to complete their assigned jobs and tasks. Continue reading →

The Popular Culture Embraces Emerson College As Emerson College Embraces Anti-White Racism

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As frequent readers here know, I frequently hear more ethics alarms in seemingly small things than in the major stories everyone else is talking about. This is one of those situations.

Boston’s Emerson College [full disclosure: my aunt got her speech degree there) is being promoted in the 4th season of Netflix’s cult fantasy/horror series “Stranger Things.” One of the shows heroines, Nancy Wheeler (played by Natalia Dyer), ostentatiously wears an Emerson T-shirt: she’s attending the liberal arts college in the 1980s, where the Stephen King-referencing show takes place. Now Emerson is cool. Copies of the shirt are being sold to support the victims’ families in Uvalde.

Emerson College is an enthusiastic agent of anti-white racist ideology that indoctrinates its students accordingly.

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A New Tale Of The Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck: The Home Test Cheating Algorithm

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Will there ever be any appropriate consequences for the Machiavellian politicians, incompetent health professionals, irresponsible teachers and fear-mongering journalists who collectively pushed the United States into a foolish, destructive and reckless lockdown in response to the Wuhan virus and its relatives? The harm inflicted on the nation, its culture and the public has been , and continues to be, catastrophic. In comparison to so many of the disastrous results of this deep self-inflicted wound, the travails of a young student unjustly accused of cheating doesn’t seem that consequential. What it demonstrates, however, is how many victims of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck we don’t know about. I’m sure there are millions.

In truth, we know there are millions. For example, millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. Such conditions are not conducive to trustworthy or even meaningful tests, but never mind: the education community was willing to sacrifice learning for fear and bad science. Then there was the special bonus of getting rid of President Trump by knee-capping the economy.

At least remote proctoring companies boomed, offering web browser extensions that “detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computer’s microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computer’s camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.” Of course, as we learned in “War Games,” handing over critical tasks requiring judgments to machines has its drawbacks.

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Waiting For The Cool Cool Cool Of The Evening Ethics Breezes, 6/1/22: Hinckley, Depp, Wedding Snubs And Gun-Phobics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I refused to do a post on the epicly stupid Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial (which I call the “Deppamation trial,”), but now that the verdict is in, I have some passing observations. If you haven’t heard, the jury vindicated Depp, awarding him Depp $15 million that due to a cap on Virginia’s punitive damages, will end up being only $10,350,000. Heard got an unsatisfying two million based on one of her allegations against Depp. Meanwhile:

  • In a healthy society, nobody would care. The media publicity the trial received, blotting out information on genuinely important events, is unforgivable. These are both sick narcissists, and Depp’s lawsuit was reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s insane defamation suit that ended up putting him in jail. Depp was revealed as a vicious creep, and Heard, whose fame depends on her association with Depp, was shown to be worse. Heard will lose money, but Depp, who actually is talented, now has the career prospects going forward of Kevin Spacey or Bill Cosby. But as he has hinted, he doesn’t care, as long as he stuck it to the former love of his life.
  • On Headline News this morning, they spent ten minutes analyzing this trial compared to 15 seconds on the Sussmann verdict.
  • If 10% of the fools that followed this idiocy spent the time reading Roe v. Wade, the Alito leaked draft, and District of Columbia v. Heller, instead, our society would have taken a major step toward responsible citizenship.

Yecchh.

1. I’m sure you will all be thrilled to hear that John Hinckley has been cleared to be a free man as of June 15. I know Jody Foster must be thrilled. I accept the conclusion that Hinckley was delusional when he shot Ronald Reagan, press secretary Jim Brady (inflicting permanent brain damage, a police officer and a Secret Service agent. Nevertheless, I believe that an assassin or would be assassin that inflicts such harm on the nation should never see the light of day again, no matter how mentally healthy treatment may render him. An assassin even crazier than Hinckley robbed the nation of President James Garfield, who might have been one of the great ones. We hanged him. I’m glad. Reagan was never the same after he was shot, and the least Hinckley should pay in compensation is his freedom.

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