It was only yesterday that I wrote, in a post discussing the newly revealed court transcripts that show Shoeless Joe Jackson lying his head off under oath, “Don’t you love it when new evidence is discovered that casts new light old historical controversies, or better yet, show that the popular version of history is dead wrong?” Well, I don’t love it when such evidence reveals me to be a gullible dupe. That’s what the new evidence of Mitt Romney’s new tell-all book has done.

I would buy a book about organizing sock drawers before I’d purchase “Romney: A Reckoning,” the retiring Utah Senator’s even-all-scores tell-all book written with Mitt’s full cooperation by a friendly pro-Mitt journalist. The book’s existence shows Romney to be an Ethics Dunce: it is unprofessional and a betrayal of trust for government officials to participate in the creation of such books while their colleagues and associates are still active, as Ethics Alarms has explained repeatedly. Bill Barr recently did the same thing; I’m sure Donald Trump will, if he ever ends his public career before Hades comes out of the ground in his iron chariot pulled by fire-breathing stallions and pulls him into the Underworld forever.

Continue reading →

This is weird.

So…there I was last night, teaching an evening CLE legal ethics seminar centering on the career and lawyering of Clarence Darrow (I co-edited a book on this, remember, and wrote a one-man Darrow show for actor Paul Morella, who’s been performing it around the country for 20 years), and discussing the importance of character in the practice of law. In one segment, I asked the class to vote on whether various applicants for bar membership were “fit,” all of whom, like disgraced journalist Stephen Glass, I have discussed here. One of those unusual lawyers in my poll was Shon Hopwood, who served more than a decade in federal prison for bank robbery, became a “jailhouse lawyer,” went to law school after his release, passed the D.C. bar exam, was admitted to practice, and became a professor at my old alma mater, Georgetown Law Center.

I wrote a post about Hopwood in 2017, an Ethics Quiz in fact, meaning that he now has the distinction of being the only person to be the subject of an Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz twice. Though the question was, “Should a convicted bank robber be teaching law students?,” I was unusually adamant in my position: “Hell no.” I wrote in part,

Continue reading →