Etiquette and manners

Ethics Quote of the Day: Ken, of Popehat

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Listen to me: a law school calculated to make students feel good about themselves is as ridiculous as a Marine boot camp designed to make enlistees feel good about themselves. Law students, God help us, will one day be lawyers. When they are, nobody will care about their self-esteem. The prosecutors seeking to jail their clients will not be seeking to foster a sense of community. The opposing civil lawyers seeking to bankrupt their clients will not be promoting a culture of dignity and respect. Most law practice is about conflict. It’s a bloody, ugly street fight. Self-esteem borne of law-should-be-harmony is useless to clients. The only self-esteem useful to clients is self-esteem earned by hard work, determination, command of the subject matter, and the willingness to stand up to adversity. People who object to law professors being wickedly Socratic, and classmates being cutthroat, are missing the point. If you’re put off by a Socratic professor, Mr. Fluffy Bunny, a run-of-the-mill judge is going to make you soil yourself. If nasty, backstabbing classmates upset you, the first time you get into a nasty letter-writing campaign with an opposing counsel you’re going to have a breakdown. Law school is not a fucking spa day. It’s training to stand between your client and whatever the world throws at him.”

—– Ken, the astute lawyer/sage/Don Rickles of the libertarian social commentary website Popehat, excoriating the University of St. Thomas Law School for, among other things, extolling the values of self-esteem, collaboration, harmony and community among their students.

What Ken is really talking about is zealous representation, that once universally accepted bedrock of the  lawyer’s duty that has gradually fallen into disfavor with many academics and lawyers. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Provocative T-Shirt Problem:

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"Oh yeah? Well, your good manners and dignity offend ME!"

Sometimes I receive terrific comments to posts via e-mail, and sometimes I decide to make them Comments of the Day. And sometimes I decide to do that and forget, like I did with this comment, from Neil Penny, in response to my July 26 post about Dollywood forcing a patron to cover the mild political message on her T-shirt that “might offend some.” Neil’s comment was about the anecdote included in my post, relating how the dress code at my college was brought down by a concerted effort to comply with its letter rather than its spirit, and how the subsequent loss of decorum in the dining hall was regarded my many students, including me, as a diminishment of the experience.  Here is that lost “Comment of the Day”—my apologies to Neil for the delay: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A symptom and a cause

“You name it, they’re there to diminish it, destroy it.”

—-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), quoted in the Washington Post today, describing the Republican Party.

If you listen to talk radio, as I, unfortunately, must, you hear statements like Pelosi’s all the time. Conservative talk show host Mark Levin, for example, will say, every day, usually more than once, loudly, that liberals/Democrats/ Obama “want to destroy America.” (Then he plugs his book. Or says, “Just like identity thieves want to destroy your credit!” and does an ad for “Lifelock.”)  It is irresponsible, hateful and ignorant for Levine (and Rush, and Monica Crowley, and lots of others) to make this and similar statements, though in Levine’s case, at least, not insincere, for he clearly believes every bit of it.

These are just talk show hosts, however. They are at least 50% entertainers, and 100% partisans, though they still have ethical duties of honesty, fairness, civility and responsibility which they regularly toss to the winds in the interest of ratings. They don’t meet their profession’s ethical standards, even though those standards are  low.

Pelosi’s are much, much higher, for she is an elected official of the United States of America. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, Ethics Hero: Name Calling and One-Way Civility On the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

John Boehner was just like this during debt ceiling negotiations. Well, sort-of. OK, he really wasn't like this at all, but I don't like him, so it's not uncivil for me to say he was.

The popular Democratic, progressive, liberal and news media (I know I’m being redundant here) slur for the Republican House and its Tea Party warriors during and after the budget ceiling debate was “terrorists,” suggesting an analogy between the GOP insisting on major expenditure cuts in the budget as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, and political and religious extremists who threaten to kill people if they don’t get their way. Needless to say, it’s a disgraceful, dishonest, illogical and slanderous comparison. Whether the GOP’s negotiating stance was fair, reasonable or right can be debated; that the intent of the strategy was to strengthen the nation’s financial health is not.

To many of the Republicans involved, incurring more debt without a guarantee of serious deficit and debt reduction in the future was more dangerous than allowing the nation to default on its obligations. Add to that the fact that many in the Tea Party  leadership believe that the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling was overblown, and it is clear: the Republicans were using their control over the immediate fate of something progressives  wanted more than conservatives as a bargaining chip in a political disagreement. It may have been irresponsible; it may have been a risk; it may have been a bluff. But it was not terrorism. It was politics. Hardball politics no doubt, but well within accepted standards

Oh, I forgot: there is another reason the Republicans weren’t acting like terrorists. They weren’t threatening to kill anybody, and they didn’t kill anybody. Continue reading →

You Thought THAT Was Outrageous Sexual Harassment? No, THIS Is Outrageous Sexual Harassment…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Yes, disbarred judge Ted Abrams’conduct was terrible.  His harassing behavior towards a female lawyer, however, was chivalry itself compared to what Derek Wright, the owner of Pleasant Grove-based Lone Peak Controls and D& L Electric Control Company, subjected the company’s office manager to during her five year tenure, before he fired her for complaining about him.

In her sexual harassment law suit filed this week, Trudy Nycole Anderson alleges that Wright…

  • …Gave her a Monday-through-Friday “schedule” outlining what she should wear, with “Mini-skirt Monday,” “Tube-top Tuesday,” “Wet T-shirt Wednesday,” “No bra Thursday” and “Bikini top Friday.”
  • …Repeatedly asked her about her breast size and talked about her breasts in front of other employees.

Now THIS is Sexual Harassment!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Arizona Supreme Court has both censured  former municipal court judge Theodore “Ted” Abrams, prohibiting him from serving as a judge again, and disciplined him as an attorney, suspending his law license for two years. Why, you may well ask?

Well, it seems that before he resigned as a judge there was  a bit of a woman problem: if an attractive woman appeared before Abrams as an attorney, she had a problem.

The State Bar of Arizona determined that Abrams, while serving as a judge, “engaged in a prolonged and relentless effort to sexually harass a female assistant public defender who appeared in his court,” as well as, “in a gross misuse of his power, … inflict[ing] his retribution from the bench for the victim’s refusal to yield to his pursuit.”  Over a 14-month period, Abrams sent the woman at least 28 voice mails and 85 text messages, many of which were sexually overt, including one in which he described a sex act he wanted to perform on her. He repeatedly pressured the lawyer for sex, made slurping noises—I’m pretty sure there is something in the judicial code of conduct that prohibits that-– and once fondled her buttocks. Continue reading →

Hate Thy Neighbor: the Cranston Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Cranston, Rhode Island resident Edward Jimmis, it is fair to say, is an idiot.

That’s okay. There are a lot of idiots, and they do very well. Many of them, perhaps a majority, are even in Congress. Now, when the constituents of a Congressional districts represented by an idiot get tired of the idiocy, they have a very effective remedy. They can vote the idiot out of office, and this is fair, ethical, and effective, though not exercised nearly as often as it should be. What is the ethical response, however, when you discover that your neighbor is not only an idiot, but an especially hateful and uncivil idiot? This is the challenge facing the neighbors of Edward Jimmis. They may not have the right answer. Continue reading →

More Advice Column Incompetence: The Case of the Jealous Sister

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"My wife is behaving irrationally. Is it me, or might she have a teeny problem of her own?"

Once again an advice columnist’s response has me considering whether there needs to be a standard of malpractice for the profession, especially when desperate, trusting people rely on them in times of crisis. I agree that anyone who is prepared to adopt the recommendations of a stranger that are based on a probably inadequate and incomplete description of a dilemma, especially when the columnist could well be a college intern, the janitor or a lunatic, is in desperate straits indeed.  Still,  if you are going to give advice, it had better meet some bare minimum of competence—even if you are just an intern.

A sad and remorseful man wrote “Annie,” the Boston Globe’s advice maven, about whether there was hope for his marriage, which recently and unexpectedly exploded. Continue reading →

The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Great idea, Mandy! Let's elect President Obama our school Homecoming Queen! He could use a a boost."

Integrity. 

Violate it at your peril. This is especially true if you are running a competition, no matter how trivial it might be.

Not only may a momentary waiver of integrity for what seems like an admirable cause permanently render a competition and the honor of winning it meaningless, it well may inspire the well-meaning and misguided to stretch the questionable logic of your decision to the breaking point.

Almost everyone has seen the heart-tugging TV ad from the mysterious Foundation for a Better Life, in which a high school girl with Down Syndrome is crowned Homecoming Queen. (“True Beauty. Pass it on!”) It bothered me the moment I saw it—at least after I wiped the tear from my eye. Based on a real incident in Missouri in 2008, the spot illustrates an ethical conflict between kindness and caring on one side and fairness and integrity on the other.

Of course this was a nice thing to do. It was undeniably kind, and the student involved will surely regard it as a high point in her life. But what does the Homecoming Queen title mean now, once it has been awarded for purposes completely divorced from its original purpose? If there is another Down Syndrome student in future years who doesn’t get a crown, will this indicate to her that she is less deserving of the award, and somehow lacking, since, after all, a girl like her won in a past year? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is Bunting to Break Up a No-Hitter Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I want to get this on the record for all time, because the controversy comes up almost ever baseball season. it came up again yesterday.

In Sunday’s baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and Los Angeles Angels, Tiger pitcher Justin Verlander was six outs from joining Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, and Nolan Ryan as the only pitchers since 1900 with three or more no-hitters in their careers. But the Angels’ Erick Aybar tried to end the no-hitter with a bunt single leading off the eighth against Verlander. He got it, too, except that the home town scorer attempted to preserve Verlander’s historic bid by charging an error instead. (Unethical. But I digress.) Continue reading →