The Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School has lined up over 100 speakers. It is giving them no honorarium, hotel, meals or travel expenses, and despite the fact that they are providing the content and attraction for the event, the Conference still requires them to pay registration fee of $350. Stanford is also charging its students a registration fee to attend, generously reduced to “only” $250. But the conference can afford to be so generous, because it will also be getting registration fees from lawyers who are required to fulfill bar-mandated Continuing Legal Education requirements.
I have argued, and behavioral science suggests, that thinking about ethics helps one’s ethics alarms work well and often. The Stanford Conference suggests that either this is not as certain as I believed, or that the people running the ethics conference don’t actually think about ethics, which, if true, adds fraud to their list of ethical outrages.
The unfair and irresponsible requirements of the Stanford event has prompted least one prominent legal ethicist, Prof Monroe Freedman, to abandon plans to attend, saying, “I’m a card-carrying capitalist, but this kind of exploitation in the name of ethics could turn me into a Marxist, or a cynic.”
We should be concerned about a culture whose those in the ethics business are increasingly unethical. The sad lesson seems to be that when there is a conflict between commerce and ethics, commerce wins.
