Arts & Entertainment

A Shocking Ice Dancing Judging Scandal at the Winter Olympics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

You can read the details of this completely predictable and in general ridiculous ice-dancing judging scandal here, here, and here. I’m not going recount the details because the details are misleading.

The ethics story is that the American ice dancing team of Madison Chock and Evan Bates lost the gold to the French team of Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron because a French judge, Jezabel Dabouis, favored Beaudry and Cizeron by nearly eight points (make that “points”) over the three-time world champions in the free dance, a margin inexplicable when compared to the scores of the other judges, and so large that if her score were removed entirely, Chock and Bates would have won the top prize easily.

Pages: 1 2

Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 4

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I like the show in general, but its writers need to catch up with the Rules of Professional Conduct and their interpretation.

Twenty years ago, in “The Sopranos,” Tony and his wife Carmella were having marital problems—gee , I wonder why?—and Tony was tipped off that she was looking for a divorce lawyer. So Tony contacted every major divorce lawyer he could find to tell them all about his marriage on the pretext that he was considering retaining one of them.. The idea was to conflict them all out of representing her, because they had received confidential communications from Tony.

Rule 1.18, relatively new at the time, held that lawyers had to keep the confidences of even potential clients, making such a dastardly tactic possible. But not long after that episode of “The Sopranos” revealed the loophole in the rules, courts and legal ethics opinions closed it with the sensible holding that someone only consulting a lawyer to create a conflict and not as a good faith effort to seek legal representation was not a genuine potential client.

Nevertheless, in the current season of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Mickey’s newly minted lawyer associate (and ex-wife) says she got her first family law client because the woman had been frozen out of hiring the established divorce lawyers after her louse of a spouse had pulled Tony’s old trick.

True, it’s not always easy to prove that an estranged spouse is seeking conflicts rather than a lawyer. Nonetheless, lawyer TV shows are ethically obligated not to deceive the public. Tony Soprano’s method is unlikely to work now, and hasn’t been viable for at least a decade.

In one area, “The Lincoln Lawyer” deserves praise for properly representing a lawyer’s duty that Hollywood almost always ignores. Whenever Mickey Haller, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” is presented with a plea deal or another offer from the opposing attorney, even if Mickey makes it clear that he thinks the offer is ridiculous, he always says, “I’ll run it by my client,” which he has to do. But even in some of the most celebrated legal films, like Paul Newman’s “The Verdict,” the lawyers don’t do that. As a result, many clients don’t know their attorney can’t reject or accept a settlement offer without consulting them. That misconception can cause real harm.

The previous installments of these legal ethics commentaries on the streaming series can be found here, here, and here.

Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

Pages: 1 2

Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In this limited series of as yet undetermined length, I’ll be examining the legal ethics issues raised by the Netflix limited series of as yet undetermined length based on the Michael Connelly character, fed through the filter of the ubiquitous David Kelley.

I’m not going in strict order chronological order because why should I? This issue is a rich one, and arrived in Season 3 of the show. A prostitute whom Mickey had advised and had testified to help a client in Season 2 turned up dead, and he agreed to represent the man, her cyber pimp, accused of killing her before he realized she was the victim. Mickey liked and sympathized with the victim; whether he was officially her lawyer is a bit vague, but she seemed to think of him that way.

Can a lawyer represent a defendant accused of killing a lawyer’s client? Sure enough, this has happened; there’s even a Supreme Court case about it.

Pages: 1 2

Catching Up With “The Lincoln Lawyer” Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer” series has dropped its fourth season. This gave me an excuse to revisit the first three seasons of the legal show, based on the Matthew McConaughey film, itself based on Michael Connelly novels, about sketchy a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney whose office usthe backseat of a chauffeur-driven Lincoln town car. The series—it’s Netflix after all—has DEI’ed the movie, with Micky Haller, the central character, being transformed into a Mexican-American who speaks Spanish frequently (though not as often as Bad Bunny) and is played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, a Mexican actor who only plays Hispanic roles when he appears in U.S. movies and TV shows. He was, for example, the gratuitous Hispanic father in the ostentatiously “diverse” “Jurassic World” franchise addition last year (the worst of them all, in my opinion). That is not to say he isn’t an appealing, intelligent, entertaining leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.”

The show makes a point of highlighting legal ethics dilemmas, as Mickey habitually tightropes along ethical lines to zealously represent his clients. A fellow legal ethicist thinks the show is unusually good in this realm. I’m not quite so enthusiastic. I will examine some of the legal ethics dilemmas that surfaced in the first two seasons over the next couple days.

Today’s featured problem:

Pages: 1 2

The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times:

Pages: 1 2

Ethics MEGA-Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As I noted in the previous post, President Trump had an epically unethical week, even for him. I found out about the latest horror on Facebook and “X”, from the post above by my friend Mary Milben, who proved her integrity and courage. Mary, you see, is MAGA’s official songbird. a brilliant soprano who has performed at many Republican functions from coast to coast. She is also an African-American who has suffered criticism for her support of the President as all high-profile black conservatives do. Despite the fact that her prominence, celebrity and livelihood depends on her relationship with the President and his supporters, she immediately spoke out against Trump’s Truth Social account posting of a 62-second video on conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 Presidential election. At the very end was added a non-sequitur section, set to the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,”showing Trump as the Lion King and various Democrats as jungle animals, including Barack and Michelle Obama as…apes.

I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple “niggers.”

After an uproar that I will bet is not going to subside, perhaps ever, the video was taken down. Karoline Leavitt, presumably following orders, took a defiant (and stupid) stance, saying “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

You know, like the desperate search for Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother. The President of the United States appearing to compare the most popular African-Americans in the nation and the only black First Couple as sub-human primates isn’t news. Seriously, Karoline?

Pages: 1 2

Nominee for Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Decade: Someone At The Grammys, It Doesn’t Matter Who, Since The Audience Erupted In Cretinish Applause…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

“No one is illegal on stolen land.”

—Okay, I do know who it was: Billie Eilish, accepting the Grammy for song of the year.

I can’t imagine why anyone would watch the Grammys, and find it even more unimaginable that anyone would care what these under-educated, bubble-dwelling narcissists think about anything, but as usual for this crowd, one after another stepped up to the mic last night and again proved the immortal wisdom of Laura Ingraham’s edict, “Shut up and sing!”

Eilish’s quote is legally, logically, historically and factually absurd, and yet progressives increasingly find it inspiring and persuasive, which should tell you all you want to know about the current state of that ideological malady. Eilish’s nonsense was the most catchy of the many open borders outburst of the night, but there were many others, like…

Pages: 1 2

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Yes, that screenshot does speak for itself, but I have some observations anyway:

1. If you’re not familiar with how “Rotten Tomatoes,” the film review aggregator, works, the “popcorn meter” at 98% reflects positive reviews by ordinary movie viewers, and the smashed green tomato tells us that theprofessional critic consensus was only 6% favorable.

2. There is always a chance that the popular reviews were rigged by MAGA zealots. The film “Melania” did have a surprisingly strong box office in its opening weekend, however.

3. The divide does not mean that the critics are wrong. A similar split occurred initially after the critics savaged the all-female “Ghostbusters” re-boot. That movie was, in fact, almost unwatchable.

4. The stats do appear to demonstrate, however, in this case, that movie critics tend to be members of the progressive bubble, and are probably incapable of watching anything connected to President Trump objectively.

5. In my opinion, the split also shows incompetent and irresponsible critics. The job of a critic is to inform audiences whether they are likely to enjoy a movie, not to solely apply the critic’s eccentric and personal tastes. Of course, I have my own biases as a periodic director, performer and playwright…and yes, occasionally a critic. My favorite theater critic was the great Robert Benchley, who often said, in effect, “this kind of play isn’t my cup of tea, but if you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this.”

____________

Pointer: Althouse

Your Daily Dose of Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This turned up on my Facebook feed this morning.

Nice.

Among the dozens of immediately likes, “hearts” and LOL emogis, right at the top, was the name of a long-time dear friend, usually wise, kind, and rational, a religious woman who believes in the Golden Rule. But she is hopelessly Trump Deranged, so all of those qualities go AWOL when the President is the topic.

I thought a lot of the attacks on Michelle Obama from the Right were vicious and indefensible, but her conduct was being criticized on its own terms rather than simply consisting or contempt for having the bad taste to marry Barack. Michell also kicked the bees nest more than any previous First Lady and had more than her share of well-earned ridicule…

….but no First Lady has ever been savaged like Melania. (Rachel Jackson’s treatment by her husband’s opponents was the closest.)

If she were not a public figure, a public statement that Melania was a sex worker would be per se defamation. But she’s the President’s wife, and apparently even to good Christians when they are Trump Deranged, Melania is fair game, just as David Letterman (who is scum, in case you have forgotten) thought it appropriate to suggest on national television in 2009 that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had sexual relations with Alex Rodriguez, the Yankee All-Star steroid cheat.

Please get well soon, my friend.