Rights

Who Says The Supreme Court Is Partisan On Every Issue?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments


The Supreme Court yesterday sided 8-0 with a straight (okay, “cis”) woman in Ohio who filed a “reverse discrimination” lawsuit against her employer after her boss declined to promote her, preferring to promote “rainbow” staffers. In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Justices agreed that a federal appeals court in Cincinnati erred by imposing a tougher standard for the case brought by Marlean Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group. 

The appellant, a straight, white woman, had filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that she had been the victim of employment discrimination based on her not being gay. The department had hired a lesbian for the position that she had sought, she contended, as well as a gay man to replace her after she was demoted.  The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit threw out Ames’s sexual orientation claim, arguing that her claim could not go forward unless she could show “background circumstances” to support her allegations of reverse discrimination, such as a “pattern” of reverse discrimination. 

SCOTUS reversed, sending the case back to the lower court. Federal employment discrimination law, Jackson explained, prohibits intentional discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Period. Minorities have no more intrinsic grounds to claim discrimination than majority groups.

Thank you!

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Stop Making Me Defend the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Almost a year ago, Ethics Alarms discussed the case of Liam Morrison (above), a seventh grader who was told that his “There are only two genders” T-shirt was inappropriate as school attire. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld a District Court decision from 2023 that the Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts didn’t violate Liam’s First Amendment rights by telling him to change his shirt.

Chief Justice David Barron, writing for the Court, concluded that “the question here is not whether the t-shirts should have been barred. The question is who should decide whether to bar them – educators or federal judges.” He continued, “We cannot say that in this instance the Constitution assigns the sensitive (and potentially consequential) judgment about what would make ‘an environment conducive to learning’ at NMS to use rather than to the educators closest to the scene.”

I wrote, in a post agreeing with the decision both ethically and legally,

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“The Ethicist” Faces The Ultimate Ethics Test…and Flunks

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The topic is abortion.

This is discouraging, if not unexpected. After all, “The Ethicist,” aka. NYU philosophy professor Kwame Appiah, works for the New York Times, Where Ethics Go To Die. Nonetheless, the clueless certitude of his latest column is as offensive as it is indefensible for someone in the ethics field.

An inquirer asked The Ethicist “Does My Spouse Get a Say in Whether to Carry an Unplanned Pregnancy?” That framing alone was foreshadowing for what was to come; notice that the issue is a “pregnancy” and whether it is wanted. and not the snuffing out of a nascent human life, which is where this ethical conflict becomes difficult to resolve.

This time, I’m going to do running commentary on both “Name Withheld’s” query and Prof. Appiah’s answer. First, the question:

“I’m 46, unexpectedly pregnant despite having entered perimenopause, with three children already (the youngest is 4).” COMMENT: And your age and the number of children you have affects the right of an innocent life to continue how?

“My husband calls this a “disaster,” and believes abortion is the clear choice because we didn’t want another child or plan on this pregnancy.” COMMENT: Ending a human life is only a “clear choice” for psychopaths.

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And Now For Something Completely Stupid and Unethical Too: Carmel-By-The-Sea

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m not sure why I never learned that the little California municipality of Carmel-by-the-Sea in Monterey has an illegal and unethical law against high-heeled shoes, since my brain is stuffed with even more useless trivia. I know now, however, and my conviction that California is hopelessly estranged from U.S. values and principles has been reinforced (again).

In 1963 the city passed a law, recommended by a City Attorney who was evidently an idiot, requiring visitors to get an official permit in order to legally walk around the place in heels higher than two inches. You can read the local ordinance here. If one wants to walk around wearing heels over two inches in height and less than one square inch of bearing surface, a permit from the city hall is required. The permits are issued free of charge, with the name of the individual making the request and the signature of a city clerk.

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Yes, My Conservative Facebook Friends Can Be Just As Irrational As the Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A usually wise and measured conservative Facebook friend posted with approval a tweet by conservative pundit Matt Walsh, complaining about the father of a 15-year-old school shooter who killed two people and injured six others being charged after the tragedy. The killings (the girl shot herself as well, and died) occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December.

“Let’s just be honest about the pattern here,” Walsh wrote. “This is the third time that a parent has been charged for violence committed by their child. In every case, the parent has been white. There is violence committed in the streets of every major city every single day. You could blame the crappy, neglectful parents in literally all of those cases. And yet none of them have ever been charged.”

Wow, talk about the wrong hill to die on! Both of those other cases involved criminally negligent parents, and the father of the late shooter in Wisconsin may have been the worst of the three.

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The Unethical Attack On SNAP Expenditures On Coca-Cola Products and Junk Food

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Back in my first year of law school we studied a case involving poor D.C. residents spending financial assistance checks on non-essentials like furniture thanks to a special deal offered by a local store. My contracts professor, the legendary Richard Alan Gordon, gave an impassioned speech decrying the court’s conclusion that the store’s promotion was wrong and the money was misused. “Why is sustenance for the soul less essential than sustenance for the body?” he asked in his famous stentorian tones.

Okay, food stamp recipients spending them on Coca-Cola products is not quite in the same exalted territory as the life enhancements at the center of that case (I can’t recall it the case cite), but to me, the principle is the same. Conservatives are on the wrong side of this ethics debate. I don’t care if Coca-Cola makes a lot of money off of food stamps. People enjoy their products. They make people happy. Poor people deserve to be happy too now and then in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services Secretary, and Brooke Rollins, the Agriculture Secretary, both advocate stripping soft drinks and junk food from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. RFKJ has called for the government to stop allowing the nearly $113 billion program that serves about 42 million Americans to be spent on “ soda or processed foods.” “The one place that I would say that we need to really change policy is the SNAP program and food stamps and in school lunches,” Kennedy told Fox News. “There, the federal government in many cases is paying for it. And we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”

Well, one man’s poison is another man’s pudding. Rollins has said, “When a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they OK with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious?” No, the correct question is whether Americans think that the poor and low of income should have taxpayers lightening their burden and allowing them to make the same choices regarding the pursuit of happiness that anyone else has, within practical limits.

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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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Non-Citizen Speech Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Reason” (of course) has an article up headlined “Immigrants and Radicals Have the Same Free Speech Rights as Everyone Else.” That may be correct, but it’s not at all certain, and I’m not sure it’s ethically necessary either. (Shame on “Reason” for following the Left’s deliberate conflating of immigrants with illegal immigrants.)

Marco Rubio and the Trump Administration are asserting that foreign students, other aliens here legally but temporarily and illegal immigrants do not have the same rights of free speech as American citizens. This week, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings involving non-citizen anti-Israel college protesters and activists to go forward on the grounds that the government is targeting protected speech and therefore chilling the free speech rights of foreign university students and faculty. American Association of University Professors v. Rubio was brought by the American Association of University Professors, that organization’s Harvard and New York University chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association alleging the “chilling” of non-citizen members’ activities by federal policy.  The plaintiffs allege that members of their organization “have, variously, taken down social media posts and previously published writing and scholarship, stopped assigning material about Palestine in class, withdrawn from a conference presentation, ceased traveling abroad for conferences, ceased engaging in political protest and assembly in which they previously participated, ceased teaching a course they previously taught, and foregone opportunities to write and speak at public events,” because they fear deportation.

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Yecchh! Pooey! Instant Ethics Train Wreck In Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nothing but dunces, villains and fools in this tale….

1.Unethical catalyst: In Rochester, Minnesota, a state that has gone certifiably nuts, home of the George Floyd Freakout and a government headed by Knucklehead Tim Walz while voters send anti-Semitic Rep.”Fuck you!”Omar to Congress, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was at the playground at Soldiers Field Park when she found a young black child looking through her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The kid is a nascent thief and needs more attentive parenting.

2. First identifiable unethical adult: Hendrix, who upon discovering the invasion of her personal property called the child a “nigger.” That’s signature significance in 2025—indeed at least since the 19th Century. She’s a low-life racist, a blight on society, and deserves to be shunned and reviled. To Hell with her.

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Michigan Magistrate Judge Ray Kent, Fuddy-Duddy of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Who’s being unethical here? Obviously the judge thought it was the lawyer, and judges win these arguments. Still…

Federal magistrate judge Ray Kent was so offended by a law firm’s dragon logo appearing on each page of a plaintiff’s complaint that he struck the lawsuit filed by attorney Jacob Perrone on behalf of an inmate accusing jail officials in Clinton County, Michigan of being “deliberately indifferent” to her when she started vomiting. Perrone’s firm is called Dragon Lawyers, a perfectly acceptable name now that all but one state permits firms to have trade names rather than the traditional firm titles featuring the names of founders and partners. As you can see, the firm’s logo was embedded in the document….

…but faintly: I don’t see anything to flip out over, but flip the magistrate did. In his order Judge Kent noted that “each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multicolored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit, presumably because she is represented by the law firm of ‘Dragon Lawyers PC © Award Winning Lawyers. Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent,” Judge Kent wrote. “The Court is not a cartoon.”

And thus it was that Judge Kent gave Perrone’s client until May 5 to refile her lawsuit “without the cartoon dragon.” He also ordered her not to file “any other documents with the cartoon dragon or other inappropriate content.”

Various commentators, including the estimable Eugene Volokh, seem to think this example of a judge abusing his authority and throwing a fit over a law firm’s logo is funny. I don’t think it’s funny. True, Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f)(1) allows a court to “strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter.” But how is the dragon logo for a firm named “Dragon” impertinent or scandalous? Calling the logo “redundant” is a stretch just because it was on every page: so what?

The issue isn’t worth fighting about, so the lawyer apologized; if he wanted to fight, I think he would have a solid First Amendment argument. I guess we should be grateful that the judge didn’t help an illegal immigrant avoid ICE by sneaking out the back door.

At least as far as we know…