A stimulating ethics alarm drill surfaced over at Freakonomics, where Stephen Dubner challenged the site’s readers to help him compile a list of goods, services and activities that one can legally give away or perform gratis, but that when money changes hands, the transactions become illegal. It is a provocative exercise, especially when one ponders why the addition of money should change the nature of the act from benign to objectionable in the view of culture, society, or government. It is even more revealing to expand the list to include uses of money that may not create illegality, but which change an act from ethical to unethical. Continue reading
Professions
Who Do You Trust? Gallup Says…
According to the annual Gallup poll on the public’s perceptions of ethical conduct among professionals, the following is the ranking, best to worst, of those most trusted by the American public. The percentage is the proportion of poll respondents who ranked each profession “very high” or “high” in ethical standards. Continue reading
The Arnie Becker Rule [Updated 12/11/16]
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
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
“Scroogenomics”: Clueless About Holiday Ethics
I had decided to write about the new book “Scroogenomics: Why you shouldn’t buy presents for the holidays”early yesterday. I should have assumed that our current Scrooge-in-Chief, George Will, would have the same idea. He did, and greeted his readers with typically sour tidings as he heartily endorsed this commercially clever and ethically fatuous book. The brain-child of economist Joel Waldfogel, “Scroogenomics” argues that holiday gift-giving makes no economic or social sense, and is a net drag on everyone. Will’s quote from it is as revealing as any:
Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients’ preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for the gifts is usually less than the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on the recipients’ own purchases.
All of which means that Waldfogel (and Will) are hopelessly confused about the social and ethical value of gift-giving, which has little to do with the ratio of “the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent.” 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
Government Lawyer No-No’s
Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, two Environmental Protection Agency attorneys based in California, posted a YouTube video criticizing the Obama administration’s climate change policy, citing a Washington Post op-ed piece. When the EPA told them to either take down the video or edit out references to their work with the EPA, some organizations cried “censorship.” Continue reading
Age and the Judge
U.S. District Senior Judge Malcolm Muir recently turned 95. Many articles in the media celebrated his long and distinguished career, but none made the observation that should be as obvious as it is indelicate. Judge Muir should not be on the bench. He should probably not have been on the bench for the past decade. It is irresponsible for him to continue to be a federal judge. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 