Which of the ethics developments below will explode into genuinely significant historical and cultural developments? You never know. On this date in 1910, A violent explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 and injuring many more. The paper’s publisher Harrison Otis was a fanatic opponent of organized labor, then just beginning to get really organized, and when two union leaders, the McNamara bothers, were arrested as the likely bombers, the paper went into a major push to convince the public that they, and all unions, were evil. Organized labor responded by hiring the nation’s most famous defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to defend the two, certain that they had been framed and that a conviction for murder would destroy the labor movement. Darrow, as he described in his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” quickly discovered that a) the brothers were guilty (though they were not trying to kill anyone) and b) that there was no way they could plead not guilty—what the two union organizations that hired him assumed he would have them do—that wouldn’t result in their executions.

Darrow decided that the only way to handle his conflicting duties to both sets of clients, the unions that were paying his record-setting fee because they were certain that an innocent verdict in the trial was essential to the survival of the labor movement, and the brothers whose lives were on the line, was to get a hung jury….and the only way he could get that was by bribing a couple of jurors.

Darrow ended up being caught red-handed and tried for jury tampering, only escaping prison by being presented by a great defense lawyer—himself. In order to make everyone forget his disgrace, Darrow set out to henceforth only take on high-profile cases that would have him fighting for human rights: every case we associate with Darrow today came after the LA Times bombing trial, which he had intended to be his last before retirement. Amazingly, he did make everyone forget that fiasco, an ethics lesson in which he made fateful call that the ends justify the means. Today, so no lawyer is ever placed in Darrow’s position again, the ethics rules in all jurisdictions hold that a third party paying a lawyer to defend another is not a client no matter how important the result of the trial may be.

1. Nancy Pelosi, ethics villain. More irony: it is astounding that the Democratic Party can get away, even a little bit, with screaming to the heavens that Republicans are a “threat to democracy” when they have allowed an openly unethical,villainous woman like Pelosi to lead their national legislators for so long. Even when her failing mental acuity leads her to reveal her vile character, as it did yesterday, there seem to be no consequences. “We have a shortage of workers in our country and you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying why are you shipping these immigrants up north, we need them to pick the crops down here,” Pelosi said, discussing the need for “comprehensive immigration reform” without saying what that would be. She also stuttered a while before deciding wich misleading word to use for “illegal immigrants,” because her party and its allies have so many deceitful ones: “Migrants”? “Undocumented workers?” “Tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? She settled on “immigrants.” Her message–it would be nice if the news media explained it to our lazy, have awake public—was that farmers should be encouraged to pay illegal immigrants paltry wages to avoid paying enough to attract American workers. What an awful, awful human being—and she’s a revered leader of the Democratic Party.

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The post about Aaron Judge’s quest to be the American League’s record-holder for home runs in a season sparked some interesting baseball reflections in the comments, but I fell down on the job: yesterday marked the date in 1941 that Ted Williams became the last of the .400 hitters (whoever wins the AL batting championship this season will probably be under .320). And it’s a real ethics story! Told that his average, just under .400 but with enough past the decimal to be rounded up to the magic number in the record book, Ted was advised by his manager, Joe Cronin, to sit out the doubleheader that would close the season. Williams, in a famous demonstration of integrity (Ted was always an integrity stickler) insisted that he wouldn’t “back in” to a .400 average, and risked a place in history by playing in both games, though they were meaningless in the standings. With the same determination that allowed him to homer, as he had promised, in his final at bat in 1960, Ted got six hits in eight at-bats during the two games in Philadelphia, boosting his average to .406.

1. This is hard to digest: YouTube has demonetized a supercut video of Democrats claiming that Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was “stolen” or not “legitimate,” claiming that it “isn’t suitable for all advertisers” and “as a result, it will continue to run limited or no ads.” In fact, the video is not misleading in any way; it just shows the utter hypocrisy of the current Democratic Party’s condemnation of “election denial.” Here’s the video:

I remember all of this; its real significance is the degree to which Big Tech is determined to cover for the Left’s hypocrisy. Donald Trump’s entire four years in office were crippled by the effort by the “Axis of Unethical Conduct” to paint him as being elected by a diabolical alliance with Russia; it harmed the nation, our democracy, divided the country and directly seeded the current political chaos. These people should be ethically estopped from attacking Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “rigged;” I can, but they can’t. Literally, they started it (and Trump has a better case than the Democrats ever did.)

YouTube election misinformation policies prohibit users from posting “misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm” and “content interfering with democratic processes.” Videos that advance “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in certain past certified national elections” as well as “content that claims that the certified results of those elections were false.” That video doesn’t do any of these things. It just properly exposes Google/YouTube’s political allies, who deserve to be exposed.

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Among the other horrible unintended consequences of the destructive response to the Wuhan virus pandemic is that it has made professionals lazy. I just completed my first legal ethics seminar in front of a live out-of-town audience in more than two years, and only my fourth with participants I could look at and talk to in that time. I am told that lawyers like the convenience of getting their Continuing Legal Education credits using Zoom, from the comfort of their homes or offices.

In the program two days ago, for example, ten lawyers attended by coming to the classroom, but over 190 watched remotely.

Well, as our children found out over the past two years of panic and fearmongering, remote learning doesn’t work. I know that many of those seminar attendees out in Zoomland are doing billable work, or playing with their dogs, or otherwise not giving the topic their full attention. Legal ethics is essential for a self-policing profession like the law, and ethics is hard; being an ethical lawyer takes practice. In trainings, that means being tested with tough questioning by the instructor ( that is, me). Now, however, most lawyers want to exert the least effort possible while getting their mandatory credits, meaning that they are not taking their responsibilities seriously. Many will suffer for this. More importantly, clients will suffer.

In this vein, I praised the attorneys who eschewed Zoom the past two days, and told them that I would reward each them of the with a gratis hour’s worth of ethics consultation over the next twelve months. I charge $390 an hour, so if the time is used, it will more than cover their fee for the seminar.

I then learned that two of the Zoom attendees complained bitterly to the state sponsors. They hadn’t known that I would be handing out that bonus, they said; if they had, they said they would have come in person too. There’s a flaw in this reasoning: I don’t receive the fees for the session, and the sponsoring group wasn’t giving out the free hours. It was a spontaneous gesture on my part.

Nonetheless, I agreed to let the sponsor tell the angry Zoomers that they could have a free hour too, even though they hadn’t earned it.

• Much gratitude to the commenters who responded to my appeal for a lively Open Forum after previous September Fridays had yielded wan participation.  It’s now at 51 posts and rising; more importantly, the posts are provocative and useful. Thanks.
• Today marks the anniversary of the first televised debate between Presidential candidates in 1960. Such debates, with all their flaws, are a boost for effective democracy, but the exaggerated belief that optics rather than substance caused the single Nixon-Kennedy debate to lose the election for Nixon put the feature on ice for 16 years. Beginning with the 1976 Ford-Carter debate, it can be argued that Presidential debates have been decisive in tilting elections more often than not: Ford’s claim that Poland wasn’t an Iron Curtain country, Carter’s obviously dishonest tale about his nuclear weapons chat with Amy, Dukakis shrugging off the hypothetical murder and rape of his wife, President Bush check his watch as if the chore of having to campaign bored him, Al Gore’s bizarre debating performance…and more recently, President Trump’s botching of one debate against an obviously handicapped opponent and his foolish rejection of another. The questions posed to Kennedy and Nixon were objective and fair: if only that element could be restored somehow, televised debates could be the unequivocal boon to democracy they should be.
• A baseball note: Over the weekend, Albert Pujols hit his 699th and 700th home runs, joining Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth as the only sluggers in U.S. baseball history to do so. (All right, Barry Bonds reached 700 too, but he cheated.) This is the first time in ten years that Albert has performed to a degree that justified his contracts, and that’s mostly because he is only being paid $2.5 million as a part-time DH by the Cardinals, his original team. That the prospect of achieving a major milestone inspired Pujols to a level of performance most assumed were gone forever doesn’t excuse his hanging on long after his predecessor greats would have said, “I quit. I’m embarrassing myself.” To be fair, none of them were guaranteed $30 million per season, either.

1. Oh yeah, this is the ethical problem the NFL should be concerned about. Apparently in the NFL, rookies are expected to foot the bill for a luxury dinner for their teammates, with the tabs reaching as high as $50,000 with tips.

In June, veteran NFL player Torrey Smith tweeted, “Dudes come into the league with no financial literacy and real problems but folks think 50k dinners are cool! NAH!” Now the league, players, fans and commentators are engaged in ethics soul-searching. Is the tradition just a ritual of team bonding, or a form of hazing that can have damaging financial consequences?

Gee, what a tough question! It’s obviously hazing. It’s bullying. It’s robbery. It’s unethical.

Next question…

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka. the Mormons has been much on my mind of late thanks to the horrific Netflix documentary “Sins of Our Mother,” about a sensational double child murder in 2019 that will have a presumably sensational trial early in 2023. I have had a great deal of experience with members of the church, almost all of it good. One of my Freshman roommates in college was a devout Morman; a long-time high school crush was a not-so-devout Mormon, and  one of my bosses in my first job out of law school was a Mormon. It’s a fascinating culture with a unique history. On this date in 1890, the Church’s  leaders issued, under duress, the “Mormon Manifesto” commanding all Latter-day Saints to uphold the anti-polygamy laws. Polygamy is unethical, but it never quite vanished among Mormons, just going underground. In the last half-century or so the Sixties mentality hangover pretty much caused law-enforcement to ignore all but the most egregious examples, and it looks as if the acceptance of same sex marriage in the law and culture may eventually slippery-slope its way to making polygamy legal too. That would be a dire societal ethics misfire, but as with the current transsexual mess, feminists will be torn between their “woke” loyalties and the fact that polygamy degrades and abuses women. Based on how feminists have handled the transgender wave so far, I am not optimistic.

1. Sure, these idiots were going to pull off an “insurrection”…Doug Jensen, an Iowa man who was one of the first ten rioters to enter the Capitol ( “during the insurrection” says NBC, thus injecting Democratic propaganda into an alleged news report)  was found guilty this week on seven counts, including felony charges of civil disorder, and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers. The evidence indicates that Jensen didn’t realize until 24 hours after the riot that he had been part of a siege of the Capitol rather than the White House. But he was a supporter of Donald Trump, and that’s crime enough….

2. Speaking of desperate and unethical excuses, disgraced GOP congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, who was outed by the Associated Press as misrepresenting his military service resulting in the GOP pulling his campaign support, now says that there is no evidence of his combat experience because “All of my deployments are listed as classified.” Why was he boasting about them in his campaign literature, in interviews and in speeches, then, if they were classified? Continue reading →

I did not expect this; heck, I never expect this: an ethical, responsible decision, quickly and without public pressure, by the national Republican Party. The House GOP campaign organization canceled a $960,000 promotional campaign targeting Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), whom the GOP candidate, JR Majewski, was regarded as a good bet to unseat. But as your friendly neighborhood ethicist explained today, Majewski was exposed by the Associated Press as having fabricated his military record. The GOP was right to shun him, but it is unusual. The Democratic Party took no such action when it was revealed that Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal had lied for years about his service in Vietnam. Blumenthal is now a two term U.S. Senator from Connecticut.

I did not mention it, but Majewski has lied about other aspects of his career as well, describing himself as an “executive in the nuclear power industry,” which his former employer did not substantiate. Why do people do this? It is certain to be discovered. And why don’t political parties properly vet their candidates?

Morons. Our nation is in the hands of morons.

Also disappointing is the fact that most of the conservative media and rightish blogs were apparently going to ignore this story as long as possible. Instapundit, for example, the granddaddy of conservative blogs, hasn’t seen fit to mention Majewski’s disgrace yet, though it has had multiple notes about Stacey Abrams’ various ethics misadventures. This is a site that routinely mocks the mainstream media for burying stories that reflect poorly on Democrats, posting these two ancient tweets as a running joke:

Who can we trust? Continue reading →