Author: Jack Marshall

Baseball Ethics Dunce: St. Louis Cardinals Manager Oli Marmol

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

On this date in 1941, Ted Williams got six hits in eight at-bats during a season-ending doubleheader in Philadelphia, boosting his average to .406. He became the first player since 1930 to hit .400., and no one has done it since. Of course, Connie Mack, the Hall of Fame A’s manager, could have walked Williams every time up and prevented him from reaching the .400 mark on the theory that he was the best Red Sox batter and that not letting him swing the bat would help Mack’s lousy Philadelphia team win one or two meaningless games. Mack didn’t do that, of course, because it would have cheated Williams, cheated the fans, and cheated baseball

Fast-forward to 2025. Yesterday, the Chicago Cubs led the Cardinals 7-3 with a runner on third and two outs in the bottom of the 8th inning. Michael Busch was up, and he was flirting with baseball history: the Cubs player was 4-for-4 with two home runs already, and needed just a single to complete a cycle—a homer, triple, double and single in the same game. Cycles are for hitters what no-hit games are to pitchers: rare historic accomplishments, in fact, there have been almost exactly the same number of each in baseball history. But Cardinals manager Oli Marmol ordered that Busch be given an intentional walk, ending his pursuit of the cycle. The Cubs fans booed, and I’m pretty sure that Cardinal fans would have booed the decision too if the game had been in St. Louis.

Continue reading →

Question: Will Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill’s Dual Military Scandals Cost Her Any Democratic Votes in the NJ Governor’s Race?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I guess the follow-up question is, “Should it?’

Republican Jack Ciattarelli almost won against current Governor Phil Murphy, who is now term-limited out in Blue New Jersey, considered a Democratic stronghold. Now Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill is running for governor against Ciattarelli. Sherrill has run on her military record both to get into Congress and now, but she also has two separate scandals that undermine her credibility and right to the public’s trust.

Scandal #1: like Tim “Knucklehead” Walz, she has claimed to have held a higher rank than she actually had. In more than 20 fundraising appeals during her time in Congress, her campaign referred to her as a retired lieutenant commander. Sherrill’s Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty form states otherwise: she retired from the service as a lieutenant. Sherrill attended the United States Naval Academy and served in the Navy until 2003. She was nominated for the rank of lieutenant commander, but was never confirmed. Never mind: she’s been advertising herself at the higher rank ever since. In 2021, Sort-of President Joe Biden referred to Sherrill as “lieutenant commander” during public remarks in her state, and Sherrill quietly accepted the promotion.

Democrats apparently don’t care about their elected officials lying about their military records. There’s Walz, of course, and Connecticut U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal won his seat (and re-election) despite years of claiming combat experience in Vietnam that he never had (he “misspoke”).

Continue reading →

Briefly Noted: Bill Maher’s Ridiculous (and Unethical) Analogy

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In a monologue being hailed for its Democratic centrism, opportunistic comic/pundit (you never know when he is being which) Bill Maher argued that the woke position that men should be regarded as women and vice versa accoring to their heartily felt whims of the moment was the irrational equivalent of the conservative belief that human fetuses were as worthy of having a chance to live as newborn babies.

I don’t have any interest in the policy analysis of anyone who regards that as a valid comparison. For one thing, human fetuses that are allowed to live become babies, and after that, fully functioning human beings. Men do not become women no matter how much they want to. I suspect know his analogy is false, but he also knows the majority of his fans lack the intellectual capacity to realize that.

It demonstrates the miserable state of public discourse in America that a cynical lightweight like Bill Maher is considered profound.

End of an Awful Week Ethics Potpourri, 9/17/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How awful? Oh, awful for me personally, a I was sick for most of it and had a serious Missing My Dead Wife relapse; awful for ethics, as there were even more disgusting events than usual; awful for good taste, as Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air, where he is and has always been a toxic pollutant, and the Trump Administration’s ham-handed attempts at censorship turned the creep into some kind of First Amendment martyr—is that enough for you? It’s enough for me. Meanwhile…

1. Kash Patel fired all of the FBI agents who kneeled to honor George Floyd, or Black Lives Matter, or something. Ooooh, another freedom of speech controversy, and another opportunity to accuse the Trump Administration of being racist! Was this move necessary, fair and responsible, never mind legal? My verdict: unnecessary, fair and arguably responsible, as such conduct shows wretched judgment and possible anti-law enforcement bias, but as speech goes its rather vague to justify firing, don’t you think? Or is it just MAGA grandstanding?

2. Speaking of grandstanding, former child star and #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano decided to make a public spectacle of having her breast implants removed. The 52-year-old shared an Instagram photo of herself in a hospital gown, and explained why she’s undergoing the removal process. “Today I’m releasing those false narratives, the parts of me that were never actually parts of me,” she wrote “I’m letting go of the body that was sexualized, that was abused, that I believed was necessary for me to be attractive; to be loved; to be successful; to be happy.” Translation: “I haven’t worked in years, and the implants weren’t doing me any good, so my publicist thought I could get some interviews and podcasts by making a big deal out of getting rid of the things.” Is she also eschewing make-up, hair extensions, false eyelashes, tooth implants, botox and other parts of her that were never actually parts of her? Those implants did their job (they got her the role of “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher once upon a time), but now that they have outlived their usefulness, she’s kicking them on their way out. Seems mighty ungrateful to me! Aging, desperate celebrities and attention addicts are a tragic group….

Continue reading →

Oh-Oh. Here Come the Robo-Judges…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Google “AI judges” and you will see many links to news articles and even scholarly treatises about the use of artificial intelligence in the judiciary. There are already bots trained as “judicial opinion drafting tools,” and manuals written to help judges master them.

There have already been incidents where judicial opinions have been flagged as having tell-tale signs of robo-judging, and at least two judges have admitted to using AI to prepare their opinions.

I hate to appear to be a full-fledged Luddite, but I am inclined to take a hard line on this question. The title “judge” implies judgment. Judgement is a skill developed over a lifetime, and is the product of upbringing, education, study, observation, trial and error, personality, proclivities and experience. Every individual’s judgement is different, and in the law, this fact tends to imbue the law with the so-called “wisdom of crowds.” There will be so many eccentric or individual analyses of the troublesome, gray area issues that cumulatively there develops a learned consensus. That is how the law has always evolved. In matters of the law and ethics, an area judges also must often explore, diversity is an invaluable ingredient. So is humanity.

Continue reading →

Tales of The Great Stupid: Race-baiting Serena Williams Shows “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” Like Harmonious Race Relations

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Why in the world would Serena Williams, of all people, think it is necessary or appropriate to engage in public race-baiting? The woman is rich and famous, and became a national idol playing a sport that has an overwhelmingly white fan base. Never mind: Serena was triggered when she encountered a decorative cotton plant (reportedly fake) in an un-named luxury hotel. The retired women’s tennis legend, now 43, took a video of the vase holding a cotton plant on a table in the hallway, and asked her Instagram followers, “Alright, everyone. How do we feel about cotton as decoration? Personally for me, it doesn’t feel great.”

Yeah, you’re right, Serena, the New York hotel placed a cotton plant in the hallway to slyly remind you that 150 years ago black slaves were forced to pick cotton in states hundreds of miles away. I think you should organize a boycott and start a protest organization called Cotton Plants Matter.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: The UN General Assembly Members Who Walked Out On Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Address

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This one is easy, or I hope it is. I shouldn’t have to go into much detail about how most of the United Nations disgraced itself today, even by the lowered standards of its recent bottom-of-the-metaphorical-barrel ethical incoherence, by walking out of the hall just before Netanyahu began his speech.

Delegates didn’t walk out on Fidel Castro, who betrayed his nation and enslaved it after promising to be Cuba’s liberator. They didn’t walk out on Nikita Khrushchev, who was a significant architect of The Great Purge under Stalin that murdered between 700,000 and 1.2 million people. The United Nations has defended, supported and honored dozens of depots, dictators and mass killers, but its members chose the freely elected leader of the only democracy in the perpetually violent and messed-up Middle East—which the U.N. is primarily responsible for messing up in the first place—to show such symbolic contempt, disrespect and stupidity. As Netanyahu said in the clear and persuasive speech that followed this insult, the gesture supported terrorism, giving Hamas reason to believe the horrific sneak terrorist attack in 2023 was a diplomatic success, in addition to killing innocent Jews, the Palestinian national pastime.

Continue reading →

James Comey Is Indicted. I’d Love to Say “Good,” But I Can’t

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

There is evidence that former FBI director James Comey leaked information to a third party to ensure that it reached the news media—a legal breach—and lied to Congress. Is it strong enough to meet a beyond a reasonable doubt threshold? Maybe not.

He is still an ethics villain. Comey managed to make hash out of the 2016 election, first refusing to charge Hillary Clinton for a crime that he—falsely—claimed other, lesser officials had never been charged with, and then tried to make up for handing Hillary a “Get out of the negative headlines free” card by opening a new investigation even closer to the election sparked by the appearance of some of Hillary’s emails on her assistant’s boyfriend’s computer. Comey was the epitome of the “Deep State” embedded foe of President Trump—you will recall that he recently approved of the legend 8647, as in “Kill President Trump,” in a social media post. A a fan of ethical government and democracy, I am not sorry to see some adverse consequences coming Comey’s way. As a legal ethicist, I am dubious about the indictment.

Continue reading →

Yes, It’s Another Open Forum…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

The second in three days. I wrestled over whether to skip the regular Friday Forum, having launched an emergency Wednesday forum just days before. I decided to keep on schedule because 1) a lot is happening in the Wonderful World of Ethics right now and 2) the Emergency Forum has amassed a whopping 51 comments, and its my experience that may readers won’t take the time to drill down that deep, though they miss a lot of excellent commentary as a result.

So open forum away, I say with tongue in cheek, since I hate hate hate the current fad of turning nouns into verbs (“Let’s movie!”).

Ethics Quote of the Month: SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“If it’s totally stupid, you don’t go along with it…”

—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in comments at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as he explained why he thinks the traditional reverence for Supreme Court precedent (stare decisis) makes neither legal nor logical sense

In discussions with some of my more fair and rational progressive lawyer friends about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several of them admitted that Roe was a terrible opinion, badly reasoned and sloppily written. This has been the consensus of most honest legal analysts since the 1970s, but never mind, Roe declared the right to kill unborn children for any reason whatsoever a right, so for abortion-loving feminists and their allies (including men addicted to promiscuous sex without responsibility), Roe was a “good” decision. But my colleagues who knew it was not just a poor decision but a terrible one condemned anyway, because, they said, it violated stare decisis, the hoary principle that the Supreme Court should eschew over-turning previous SCOTUS decisions even if they were outdated or clearly wrong, in the interests of legal stability, preserving the integrity of the Court and insulating the institution from the shifting winds of political power.

Like many principles, that one sounds better in the abstract than it works in reality, and Roe is as good an example as one could find short of Dred Scott. Roe warped the culture and turned living human beings into mere inconveniences whose lives could be erased at whim. How many millions of human beings don’t exist today because of the ideological boot-strapping logic of that decision, which bizarrely equated the right to contraception to the right to kill the unborn?

Reverence of bad decisions as beyond reversal is also a handy political weapon: as several wags have noted, stare decisus is mandatory when the precedent at issue is progressive cant (like Roe), but when the Left passionately believes a SCOTUS decision was wrongly decided, it’s time for an “exception” to stare decisus. In his recent appearance at D.C.’s Catholic University, where he taught at the law school until protesters against Dobbs in his classes forced him to stop, Justice Thomas pointed to Brown v. Bd. of Education, the landmark decision that overturned a well-established Court precedent holding that “separate but equal” was a principle that allowed segregation in the public schools as he neatly eviscerated the intellectually dishonest position that SCOTUS precedent must be sacred.

Continue reading →