For about 20 years, the consensus has been building in the legal profession that a lawyer sleeping with his clients is not only a bad idea, but also should be prohibited by the formal ethics rules. States like California, Oregon and New York quickly adopted such a rule while other bars resisted; when the ABA added the “no sex with clients” provision to is Model Rule 1.8 in 2003, more states followed suit. Now Virginia, one of the most respected bars in the country, is considering its first pronouncement on the subject, in the form of a formal ethics opinion. Continue reading
Law & Law Enforcement
Tiger Woods Ethics, Part II: Yes. It Matters
There are two main strains among the culturally corrosive arguments in support of Tiger Woods. One, discussed in Part I, is the “great athletes don’t need to be great human beings,” a contention that chooses to ignore the inescapable fact that they are paid to behave like great human beings, whether they are or not. While this argument is mostly obtuse, the second strain is the more ethically offensive. Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon embraced it with both arms in his defense of Woods entitled, “Some context on Tiger.” Its thesis: virtually all big-time athletes cheat on their wives, and if you had the opportunities and temptations they do, you’d cheat too. Translation: “It’s no big deal”: Continue reading
Deceit and Dishonesty in the Capital Punishment Debate
Those who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, fervently believing that the taking of human life is always wrong, also believe, it seems, that lesser sins are legitimate tools if they can save even one condemned prisoner. The misconduct of choice seems to be intellectual dishonesty, and there have recently been some obvious displays of it. Whether you believe such tactics are justifiable or not, there is no question that they muddle the capital punishment debate. Continue reading
“Biggest Loser” Ethics: “They Shoot Fat People, Don’t They?”
Lawyers being lawyers, it is not surprising that a New York Times article about the unhealthy physical stresses endured by contestants in the “Biggest Loser” reality show inspired a legal blog to wonder how long it would be before the show was hit with a large law suit. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” THR, ESQ quotes Dr. Charles Burant, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, as saying. The core problem is not liability, however. The problem is that the show is horribly, indefensibly unethical. It shouldn’t be waiting for a lawsuit, or a heart attack. The program is wrong to continue, advertisers are wrong to support it, and we are wrong to watch it. Continue reading
Moral Luck Gets Mike Huckabee
Former Arkansas Governor and current talk show host Mike Huckabee, an early leader among GOP presidential contenders in 2012, is the process of being vilified and ridiculed by conservative commentators and talk radio hosts for what appears to be a tragic instance of moral luck. Nine years ago, he issued clemency to a prisoner named Maurice Clemens, a man who had been convicted of larceny and burglary at the age of 16 and had served seven years of a 108 year sentence. Clemens was just killed after going on a two-day rampage in Seattle, Washington murdering four police officers. Now critics are blaming the deaths on Huckabee, calling him a “bleeding heart” who cares more about criminals than their victims, and demanding that this tragedy permanently end his presidential ambitions. Continue reading
Student Booze, the Police, and the Facebook Mole
The battle to define what is right and wrong regarding social networking sites continues. The Philadelphia Bar Association has decided that it is an ethics violation for a lawyer to recruit someone to make a Facebook “friend request” to a witness to pass on to the lawyer the contents of the witness’s Facebook page. The ethics committee wrote that this was dishonest conduct by the lawyer even though the witness willingly accepted the fake “friend” and would have accepted almost anyone who asked. The same tactic was pulled on University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Adam Bauer, who has over 400 Facebook friends and who accepted a friend request by an attractive young woman he didn’t know because, well, she was an attractive young woman. She was working for the police, however, and found photos on the site of Adam and a friend, Tyrell Luebker, with adult beverages in hand. They both were ticketed for underage drinking, and ended up paying a fine. Continue reading
Law, Citizenship, and the Right to be a Jackass
Three springs ago on the streets of Pittsburgh, David Hackbart was starting to parallel park when a car pulled up behind him. Don’t you hate that? Hackbart did too, and presented his flip-off finger to the anonymous driver in silent protest. “Don’t flip him off!” came a shouted edict from someone outside his car, and Hackbart, not in the mood for officious intermeddling, gave the anonymous civility referee The Finger as well. Continue reading
Robert Bowman: Aspiring Lawyer, Ethics Martyr
Robert Bowman, according to a panel of New York judges, does not have the requisite good character to be admitted to the practice of law in New York. The reason for the panel’s finding is superficially logical: he owes nearly a half-million dollars in student loans. This is, says the panel, per se proof of irresponsible and negligent financial management, making him an unacceptable risk for any client. The panel is almost certainly wrong. Continue reading
“The Good Wife” and Bad Ethics
Julianna Margulies’ latest attempt to find another hit series after “ER” is a lawyer drama, “The Good Wife.” It tells of the travails and trials of a former litigator who returns to law firm practice after her prosecutor husband, played by “Mr. Big” Chris Noth, is sent to the slammer in a scandal that also involved marital infidelity. As lawyer dramas go, “The Good Wife” is fairly good about not distorting the legal ethics rules. It still slips up, however, as this week’s episode showed. Continue reading
Lobbyist Ventriloquism and the Abysmal State of Congressional Ethics
When Washington, D.C. attorney Robert Trout delivered his closing argument in the trial of former Rep. William Jefferson (now known as “Inmate CB476881”) for, among other things, accepting a large cash bribe that was later found in his office freezer, he told the jury that the prosecution was hypocritical and unfair. After all, he said, “If seeking political help was a crime, you could lock up half of metropolitan Washington, D.C.” Jefferson’s actions may have been unethical, and they were certainly a mistake, but really now: isn’t this just what all Congressmen do? Jefferson, Trout argued, just got a little bit carried away.
Jefferson was convicted, so there is some distance left for our faith in our elected representatives to fall before it hits rock bottom. The argument was still ethically disturbing in two respects. First of all, Trout’s pitch amounted to a jury nullification plea, a defense in which a jury is encouraged to ignore the law, and that is unethical lawyering.
Second, Trout may well have been right. Continue reading
