Professions

Short Version of Ethics Verdict on Pentagon’s Elimination of Race, Gender and Ethicity As Legitimate Considerations For Admission to the Service Academies: “Good!”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Washington Post’s snotty headline is “Hegseth escalates targeting of race, gender in military’s academic settings.” That’s because he’s a racist and sexist, see, like all of the Trump allies, appointees, voters and supporters.

Oh, dear. “[T]he nation’s prestigious military academies” have been ordered “to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes” and ‘begin a purge….of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts,” gasps the Post, as if this isn’t a completely practical and fair policy. The military’s job is to protect the nation and, when necessary, to fight and fight effectively. Race, gender and ethnicity are completely irrelevant to the capability of performing those tasks, so it should be beyond debate that such considerations have no place in the determination of who should gain admission to the military academies.

There is a much stronger case to be made that “diversity” is deleterious to military morale, cohesiveness and performance, but okay, discrimination is contrary to the culture and national values, so we won’t say that women categorically don’t belong in male battle units. But they better be as capable as any of the men.

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Ethics Observations On the Allied Injury Group’s “Your Favorite Attorney” TV Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Observations:

1. Yecchh! It is both icky and unethical, indeed technically (under the Rules of Professional Conduct) so, and generally.

2. In case you couldn’t figure it out (I had to check myself), the spokesperson calling himself “Your Favorite Attorney” is an actor, indeed a stand-up comic named Shaun Jones. All of the jurisdictions prohibit lawyer advertising in any form that is misleading or that includes false information. A sole practitioner can’t call her firm “X & Associates,” for example, if she’s the only lawyer in the firm. Putting a non-lawyer in front of a camera and calling having him call himself an attorney is an undeniable violation, and an intentional one.

3. Another technical point: although I suppose it is (slightly) possible that the stand-up comic has a law license, he can’t call himself an attorney unless he has clients. Jones also says that if the client doesn’t make money, “I” don’t make money. That is deceit. The firm will argue that the actor is only saying that if the firm doesn’t win its cases, the actor won’t get paid. But his statement is intended to refer to contingent fees for attorneys, and he isn’t one.

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The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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NYT Stockholm Syndrome Pundit David Brooks Finally Wrote Something Astute and Fair Regarding Trump, So Naturally My Trump-Deranged Friend Condemns Him For It

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Imagine the late James Earl Jones’ resonant bass intoning, “THIS is Trump Derangement!” and you have the perfect backdrop for my depressing story.

A retired lawyer of great accomplishments and gravitas has recently erupted into repeated anti-Trump/anti-Republican rants on Facebook. I consider him a good freind and generally a wise one—and he’s a passionate baseball fan!—so it pains me to read this sad evidence of mental and ethical deterioration. His most recent screed began with a declaration that he now detests David Brooks. As the Ethics Alarms Brooks dossier vividly shows, there are plenty of reasons to detest Brooks, an obnoxious and arrogant conservative in his Daily Standard days, and now a sell-out who accepted the dishonest role as a token non-progressive propagandist on the New York Times opinion page and quickly “cut the cloth of his conscience to fit the fashion of the Times,” (to quote Lillian Hellman at the McCarthy hearings, except that when she said it, she used a small “t.”)

[Yikes! I just looked over my own collection of Brooks posts, and he’s even worse than I remembered. In October of 2023, for example, I nailed him for writing that President Biden was still sharp and capable though it was obvious then, a year before Biden’s debate babble-fest, that Joe was demented.]

But my learned, once rational friend wasn’t critical of Brooks for any of his lies and hypocrisy; he now detests Brooks because of this column, in which the pundit gives President Trump credit for something. It is a trait that I have also noted: Trump has amazing energy and drive, to the point of being indomitable. Brooks begins his column this way:

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Another Unethical (But Funny!) Use of AI in the Law

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In March, the Arizona Supreme Court launched two AI-generated avatars named Victoria and Daniel: thats the pair above. These AI, non-existant personas deliver news of judicial rulings and opinions in the state via YouTube videos. Jerome Dewald, a 74-year-old plaintiff was inspired to say, “Hold my beer!”

Dewald created an AI-generated video avatar to deliver his argument via Zoom in court. Five New York State judges at the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department were anticipating his pro se presentation in an employment case on March 26, but instead of the elderly litigant they saw a young man in a button-down shirt and sweater.

“May it please the court,” said the un-named avatar. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.” Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels, interrupted the presentation before the avatar (the avatar’s pronouns were “it” and “it”) could speak another word , saying “Okay, hold on. Is that counsel for the case?” After Dewald confirmed that he had generated the non-lawyer non-person using AI, Manzanet-Daniels ordered the video to be turned off.

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Pssst! Somebody Tell Sen. Klobuchar That She Needn’t Work So Hard At Embarrassing Minnesota With Gov. Walz Doing Such a Bang-Up Job of It…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

When did “Minnesota Nice” mutate into “Minnesota Stupid”?

Following the charging of a Wisconsin judge who pretty clearly obstructed justice and used her position to prevent an illegal immigrant and criminal from being arrested, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D. Minn), as you can see above, tweeted, “This is not normal. The Administration’s arrest of a sitting judge in Wisconsin is a drastic move that threatens the rule of law. While we don’t have all the details, this is a grave step and undermines our system of checks and balances.”

Remind me to shake that in front of the faces of my various friends and relatives who supported this shallow, foolish woman when she was running for President in 2020. Her tweet is one more smoking gun proving that Democratic officials will find excuses to accuse President Trump of threatening the “rule of law” and “separation of powers” and creating a “constitutional crisis” regardless of what he and his administration does.

Hilariously, Klobuchar admits that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about —“we don’t have all the details”—but in fact the details already made it as clear as Saran-wrap that Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan deliberately set out to interfere with the lawful arrest of an illegal immigrant. Dugan’s bizarre conduct revived memories of another lawless judge with a soft spot for illegals, Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph, who was indicted in federal court in Boston on obstruction of justice charges for preventing an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer from taking custody of an alien defendant. She delayed ICE while her staff secretly let the illegal escape out the courthouse back door in the Spring of 2018, before Trump Derangement had reached pandemic levels.

The details on Dugan’s effort to thwart law enforcement are worse, as this thread by Prof. Margot Cleveland amply demonstrates. Also hilariously, Democrats are condemning what sure looks like a legitimate criminal charge against a Democratic judge as politically motivated after they spent 2024 applauding lame, contrived and blazingly political prosecutions of Donald Trump while they intoned, “Nobody is above the law.”

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Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Ethics Alarms Friday Forum…

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week’s open forum was wild, man, and I hope today’s can be as lively.

Based on the early returns, there’s a lot to bloviate about in the ethics world. The amateur golf champ playing in the Masters was caught pissing into a creek on n the 13th hole at Augusta National golf course. Pennsylvania judge Sonya McKnight was just convicted of shooting her sleeping boyfriend in the head. (Seems awfully judgmental…). Almost all Democrats in the House voted against the bill requiring voter ID in Federal elections. Yes, their determination to prove the cognitive dissonance scale wrong continues apace! A black Congressman tried to discuss issues with a Trump-Deranged white female and was called a “race traitor”…

…and we learned that after VP JD Vance’s March visit to Pituffik Space Base in Greenland, the Col. Susan Meyers, the commander of the 821st Space Base Group who also oversees the Pentagon’s northernmost military base, issued a gratuitous email to the base’s personnel stating that he did not speak for her of the base. What an idiot. (She was fired.) Finally, we have this stupid incident, in which Frontier Airlines let a woman fly to Puerto Rico with her “emotional support parrot” but wouldn’t let the bird on the return flight. (Gift link.)

Be careful. It’s stupid out there…

What’s Up, Doc? UConn Med School’s Unethical, Woke, Ridiculous “DEI Hippocratic Oath”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Unbelievable.

In August of last year, UConn School of Medicine’s class of 2028 became the first to recite a newly revised version of the Hippocratic Oath:

“I will strive to promote health equity. I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

No, this is not a sick joke. No, I am not making this up. Yes, our institutions of higher education really are in the clutches of maniacs who think this kind of indoctrination is part of their job.

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Ethics Hero: Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I admit it: this post is putting the cart before the horse. I need to complete a post about the leftist lawyer freak-out over Trump targeting ostentatiously anti-Trump, anti-Republican, pro-Axis law firms by handing them the just desserts for their abandonment of legal ethics and core professional principles to pander to the Democratic Party’s cabal over the past 15 years or more. But I am a bit short of time and energy right now, and Professor Vermeule, that rarity of rarities, a conservative Harvard professor, has done some of my work for me.

Last week, more than ninety members of the Harvard Law School faculty issued a joint letter supposedly concerning the “rule of law,” but actually embracing the same double standards and anti-Trump bias I have been witnessing from my lawyer friends on Facebook and especially in the online discussions among members of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers. It said in part,

“The rule of law is imperiled when government leaders:

  • single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment;
  • threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers’ pro bono work or prior government service;
  • relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and
  • punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern.

While reasonable people can disagree about the characterization of particular incidents, we are all acutely concerned that severe challenges to the rule of law are taking place, and we strongly condemn any effort to undermine the basic norms we have described….”

This is disingenuous posturing by partisan academics pretending to be neutral patriots. Professor Vermeule called them out on their pretense, writing in part in an open letter to his own to students and the public,

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The 2024 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I write a post about this annual Gallup survey every year, but my observations apart from the obvious have been increasingly redundant. This will be reflected in my comments this year as well, largely because little has changed significantly since 2023. Gallup writes in its introduction,

Gallup began measuring public trust in various professions in 1976, initially covering 14 jobs. Over the years, the list has changed, with some occupations added and others removed. Since 1999, 11 professions have been tracked annually, while others have been included periodically.

The average very high/high ethics rating of the core 11 professions has decreased from routinely 40% or higher in the early 2000s to closer to 35% during most of the 2010s. It rose slightly in 2020, to a seven-year high of 38%, reflecting enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers during the pandemic. Thereafter, the average declined each year through 2023, when it reached 30%, and it held there in 2024. This mirrors the long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions.

There is mordant humor in that text: the enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers was wildly misplaced. The healthcare profession was inept and dishonest during the pandemic, and the teachers unions crashed the economy by lobbying to keep the schools closed for their own interests. It also reflects the trend I’ve see in these surveys for years: the public tends to trust occupations they have to trust, explaining why pharmacists and nurses have always been among the most trusted professions.

One reason the trust freefall has slowed, I believe, is that so many professions are trusted so little now that there isn’t much farther for them to fall. Only 8% of those surveyed trust Congress strongly: I’d assume that just the number of apathetic ignoramuses in the population would account for that number. It will be interesting to see if this clown show…

…drives trust in Congress lower still in the 2025 survey. And who knows what horrors are to come?

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