Law & Law Enforcement

Observations On What Appears To Be An Epic Black Lives Matter Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I will only offer observations at this point because there are so many questions to be asked that it’s premature to say exactly what happened, or in Ethics Alarms-ese, “What’s going on here?’ I stumbled across this current story by accident, while preparing a preliminary outline and seminar description for a program I’ll be doing as I have been for two decades for the annual Washington Non-Profit Legal and Tax Conference in March. What recent non-profit and charity ethics problems have arisen in the last year or so? And up popped the jaw-dropping message above.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It’s Murphy’s Law: This had to happen so soon after I wrote (somewhere around here) this week about how I felt those who spoke extemporaneously should be given the benefit of doubt when they say something stupid, offensive, or inflammatory. It does not apply in this case, however.

Senator Schumer (D-NY) was attacking Republicans in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, as is his wont, on the upcoming battle over Joe Biden’s affirmative action SCOTUS nominee who hasn’t even been chosen yet. Chuck pointed out that the Court had only white male justices until 1981. “Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn’t all white men in 1981, or ever,” Schumer said. “Under President Biden and this Senate majority, we’re taking historic steps to make the courts look more like the country they serve by confirming highly qualified, diverse nominees.”

Wow, over two hundred years without a black Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. That is outrageous. Weird too, because I have this funny memory about a black guy being on the old Warren Court before I got out of high school. The mind plays funny tricks! Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Luke Bunting ’22, Editor-in-Chief Of The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The battle over the punishment of Illya Shapiro for WrongThink—Imagine, he actually thinks excluding outstanding Supreme Court candidates by using racial and gender discrimination is unwise!—continues.

Luke Bunting, a 3L at Georgetown University Law Center who also edits one its journals, is stepping up where the GULC faculty has failed miserably. Echoing the legal academics and scholars across the country who have signed an open letter protesting the Law Center’s Dean, William Treanor’s effort to ingratiate the school with the censorious Woke and the race-baiting mob, Bunting has authored a similar letter for GULC alumni to sign. It reads,

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“Democracy Dies In Darkness” And Civic Literacy Dies By Trusting The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

A few days ago, we were treated to a Post science reporter trying to resuscitate Aristotles’ theory of gravity. Also a few days ago, a Post political reporter “informed” the renowned paper’s erudite and elite readership of the development above.

It’s hard to be more wrong than that news item. First, the Constitution is not “supposed” to include any Amendment that wasn’t ratified within the legal deadline. Thus the archivist isn’t “refusing” to add an unratified Amendment. It can’t be added. It’s not an Amendment!

But wait! There’s more, and it took a conservative law professor to point out the error:

February 2, 2022

Letters Editor

The Washington Post

letters@washpost.com

Re:Amber Phillips, ‘The never-ending fight over whether to include the Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution,’ The Washington Post (Jan. 31, 2022, 2:22 PM EST), <https://tinyurl.com/m6n3wfts>.

Dear Letters Editor, 

Ms Phillips wrote that: “Two-thirds of the states have ratified the ERA, which meets the constitutional requirements for adding to the Constitution.” This is not correct. Article V of the United States Constitution, which governs the constitutional amendment process, requires ratification by the legislatures of ¾ of the states. In certain circumstances ratification is possible by the conventions of ¾ of the states, but those circumstances are not applicable to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

In any event, as long as the United States has 50 states, ratification requires action by ¾ or 38 states, and not 2/3 or 34 states.

Sincerely

/s/

Seth Barrett Tillman 

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The Duty To Warn: As Will Surprise No One Who Is Familiar With This Blog, I See A Serious Ethics Issue Related To My Recent Visit To The Emergency Room

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I’m going to have to cover this topic with one metaphorical hand tied behind my metaphorical back, because some of the important details land in the realm of confidentiality.

Last week, one of my loved ones had a frightening experience, slowly becoming disoriented and confused regarding time, place and language, hallucinating, falling down an unlit staircase and only missing serious injury by pure luck, speaking nonsense, then gibberish, and finally being unable to speak at all. By the time the EMTs were summoned, I was worried that I was witnessing a stroke in progress, which is what the paramedics thought when they arrived.

But it wasn’t a stroke. In fact, the ER doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. By then the patient was trembling, thrashing around (so much that an MRI was impossible), frightened, angry, aggressive, and talking incessantly but incomprehensibly. They thought it might be a tumor, or an infection, or bleeding, or an interaction of many factors. It was like a “House” episode.

The real reason for the symptoms was that the patient hadn’t filled a long-standing prescription for Levothyroxine, a very common drug ( also known as synthroid) used to treat an underactive thyroid. The weather had been bad and ice was everywhere, so the trip to the CVS was put off one day, then another, then another. An unremarkable few days off the drug, which had been taken regularly for decades with occasional short interruptions, stretched into a week. That, the doctors concluded, had caused it all. Once the drug was injected, complete recovery occurred overnight.

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Ethical Quote Of The Week: Faculty Letter To GULC Dean Treanor In Support Of Illya Shapiro [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

So far, 106 professors from all points on the ideological spectrum have signed a letter to Georgetown Law Center’s Dean Treanor, telling him what should not have to be explained to a Top 20 law school dean: that “academic freedom protects [Illya] Shapiro’s views, regardless of whether we agree with them or not. And debate about the President’s nomination, and about whether race and sex play a proper role in such nominations more generally, would be impoverished—at Georgetown and elsewhere—if this view could not be safely expressed in universities.”

Shapiro, as discussed here, has been suspended (“put on leave pending an investigation”) by Treanor, and if past behavior by Georgetown Law Center is any indication, he is likely to be fired, forced to resign, or to have to humiliate himself by submitting to “sensitivity training” after a public confession of WrongThink.

Here is the letter, which appears to have been coordinated by the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education. Those seeking to add their names to the signatories can email facultyoutreach@thefire.org.

Disgracefully, no member of the GULC faculty has signed the letter to support their colleague—and the principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom at their own institution—as of this writing. Continue reading →

It Reveals The Dire State Of U.S. Higher Education Culture That Dean William M. Treanor Of Georgetown University Law Center Isn’t The Most Unethical Law School Administrator Of The Past Year (It’s Close, Though…)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That distinction still has to go to Yale Law School Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Yaseen Eldik and Associate Dean of Student Affairs Ellen Cosgrove, who persecuted, and and threatened a student in this infamous episode last Fall. Their victim is a student, which gives them an edge over Dean Treanor whose target is Ilya Shapiro, GULC’s newly hired director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and vice-president of the Cato Institute.

Just two days ago, I described Shapiro’s foray into the debate over President Biden’s looming Supreme Court nomination, which will have to be a black woman because race and gender are more important to the Far Left than qualifications, ability and experience in the branch of the government that protects the Constitution, but mostly because Joe promised he would while in Full Pander Mode as he fought for his party’s nomination to oppose President Trump in 2020. Shapiro issued a series of tweets that were crystal clear to anyone reading them rationally and honestly, making his case that Biden should be nominating Justice Breyer’s replacement on the basis of qualifications, ability and experience. A careless choice of words, however—this was Twitter, after all—gave race-baiters and progressive censors an opportunity to pounce, and they did.

Shapiro was accused of being a racist (of course); the law schools black student association demanded he be fired (also of course); and GULC’s ostentatiously woke Dean capitulated to the anti-free speech and anti-academic freedom mob, announcing yesterday to me and other “alumni/ae”, as the marvelous Dean I worked for, the late David McCarthy always called them…

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The Biden Supreme Court Pick Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wow, that was fast. This episode has turned into an ethics train wreck with record speed. Some ethics train wrecks slow down and stop after a few months; other roll on seemingly forever. The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck, which has included directly-related wrecks like the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck and the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck, is almost nine years old, and won’t stop until Black Lives Matter lies a-moldering in the grave. The 2016 Presidential Election Ethics Train Wreck is still going strong, with the Jan. 6 riot and the subsequent kangaroo court investigation in the House the latest cars to be hooked up. The Biden Supreme Court Ethics Train Wreck? At this point, where it stops, nobody knows.

It began before it was even certain Biden would get a SCOTUS nomination, when he first promised to name a black woman to the Court. That promise, which he quickly confirmed once Justice Breyer announced his retirement, was unethical “on its face,” as the Court might say. The statement means, and can only mean, that group identification is the primary priority for the President of the United Sates in nominating a crucial individual who will help determine the course of the nation’s laws, justice system, constitutional integrity and culture for decades to come. That function has nothing whatsoever to do with race or gender. Nothing. Being black, white, Native American or Asian does not make an individual more or less qualified for the job, and neither does gender. Biden’s statement literally means that he is placing tribalism and group identification biases above the substantive needs of the nation. That’s unethical. Other Presidents have done this, notably Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That’s no mitigation.

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Comment Of The Day: “Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Michael West’s rueful Comment of the Day relating Justice Breyer’s eagerly awaited (by Democrats) retirement to the deterioration of the balance of powers intended by the Founders presents a useful perspective. My only cavil is his introduction.

I think it is unfair to assume that Breyer retired to ensure that a Democrat President would choose his successor. Maybe he did, but nothing Breyer has said in his years as a Justice would be consistent with that thesis. Breyer, unlike Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has never been overtly political, and has objected to accusations that his colleagues on the Court were driven by partisan agendas. If we take him at his word, it would be extremely out of character to quit so Joe Biden could apppoint a replacement based on an ideological check list filtered through the non-merit restrictions of race and gender.  Of course, all of this is really just a bad sign for the dignity of SCOTUS and the strength of the divided government. “The only ethical reason for any Justice to retire is because it’s time to retire,” Michael begins. Well, at 83, it’s always past time to retire. I think Justice Breyer has earned the benefit of the doubt.

Now here’s Michale West’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Observations On Justice Breyer’s Retirement”:

***

The only ethical reason for any Justice to retire is because it’s time to retire. But we all know Breyer is making a strategic retirement to permit a Democrat president to appoint and a Democrat Senate to approve a Progressive to the bench. This is a clear indication of the intentional politicization of the Court – which is was never meant to be.

This is all because of the ever increasing ability of Executive Branch and now the Judicial Branch to basically become alternative legislatures to Congress which has largely surrendered most of it’s power since the technocratic growth of the bureaucracy from FDR’s time. Continue reading →

A Smoothie Incident In Connecticut

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

After the now viral video above made the rounds, James Iannazzo, 48, was arrested and charged with a hate crime following the outburst at Robeks in Fairfield, Conn. over the weekend. The Fairfield Police Department said that Iannazzo returned to the store after a smoothie he purchased caused his son, who is allergic to peanuts, to be rushed to the hospital from his home. Iannazzo apparently ordered the smoothie without peanut butter, but did not explain to employees that his son had an allergy.

The New York Post says he called a staff member a “fucking immigrant.” The Times says he called her an “immigrant loser.”

After the Merrill Lynch office where Iannazzo works was swamped in furious emails, he was fired from his job as an analyst. A spokesman for Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, told the New York Times in an email,

“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm.”

“When faced with a dire situation for his son, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear,” the father’s lawyer said. “He is not a racist individual and deeply regrets his statements and actions during a moment of extreme emotional stress.”

There are many troubling aspects to the matter.

Ethics Observations:

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