integrity

Ethics Carnage in Wisconsin: The Ethics Grades So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The battleground

The story to date: Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker announced a budget-repair measure to address  looming budget deficits (in a state with a balanced budget mandate in its constitution) by requiring state employees to contribute a larger proportion of their pensions and health care plans, and  restricting their long-standing  collective bargaining rights. Wisconsin’s deficit is projected at $30 million for the remainder of the 2011, with a shortfall of $1.5 billion projected for next year. In response to Walker’s announcement and the near certainty of his plan being passed by the Republican dominated state legislature, 14 Democratic legislators fled the state to prevent a quorum and block a vote, teachers left their classes to protest in Madison, where they were joined by thousands of pro-union protesters, many of whom were organized and bused in by Organizing for America, a White House operated political group.

Let’s try to separate the ethics wheat from the chaff—amazingly, there is actually some wheat–and get an early line on the heroes, dunces, villains, and the rest as the Wisconsin budget battle threatens to become a full-fledged Ethics Train Wreck. Continue reading →

“The Strange Case of the Threatening Hypothetical”, Continued: The Verdict Is In!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Victim

Lawrence Connell, the Widener School of Law criminal law professor placed on administrative leave for using the school Dean in a “violent scenario” to illustrate legal principles to his class, has given a revealing and clarifying interview to the National Association of Scholars website.

This section is most relevant to his current plight, and the fairness of complaints leveled against him by some of his students. It’s also about one of my favorite topics in criminal law, attempt law, which has a significant ethical component, as you will see. But the main point of interest is that includes one of the supposedly racist, sexist, threatening hypotheticals he used.

Q: Can you give me an example of a hypothetical you might have used in class, to which the students who complained might have been referring? Can you describe the context in which you would have used it? Continue reading →

The Strange Case of the Threatening Hypothetical

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Lawrence Connell, a tenured associate professor at Widener University School of Law in Delaware, is fond of using famous or familiar people in the hypotheticals he presents to his criminal law class.  One of his imaginary scenarios involved him as a murderer, and the school’s Dean as his victim. Now he is on administrative leave from the school, as administrators investigate  him for using “violent scenarios” that some students complained violated the school’s discrimination and harassment codes.

Widener University spokesman Dan Hanson, meanwhile, has declined to provide more details on the matter, but insists that Widener is committed to academic freedom.

Right. Continue reading →

Lara Logan’s Cairo Ordeal Starts An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

A female CBS correspondent gets cut off from her security while doing live coverage of the demonstrations in Cairo, is surrounded by a group of Egyptians in the crowd, attacked, and sexually assaulted. She is rescued by Egyptian police and flown back to the U.S., where she is hospitalized.

This what happened to “60 Minutes” Correspondent Lara Logan, and you wouldn’t think such an unambiguous example of brutality and criminal conduct would raise any ethical controversies. But the already nasty incident has metastasized into a full-fledged Ethics Train Wreck, with both the Left and the Right taking turns disgracing themselves.

And the media, of course. Continue reading →

Integrity Failure: Speaker Boehner, When It Counts

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Speaker of the House John Boehner wants us to know that he, unlike President Obama, is serious about making the tough spending cuts necessary to bring the Federal deficit under control, no matter whose ox is gored. “We are reducing programs that are important programs that we care about,” he has said sternly, “and we’re doing what every family does when it sits around its kitchen table: we’re making the choices about what do we need for the future.” As for the president and Democrats, Boehner has argued that their approach “was very small on spending discipline and a lot of new spending so-called investments.”

“Borrowing and spending is not the way to prosperity. Today’s deficits mean tomorrow’s tax increases, and that costs jobs,” Boehner said, making it clear that he means business.

Then yesterday, when House Republican freshmen agreed with President Barack Obama and voted to cancel an expenditure of $450 million for an alternative engine for the Pentagon’s next-generation fighter plane, Boehner didn’t support them…. Continue reading →

Ethics Night on “American Idol,” As An Ethics Hero Is Born

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Hero, Scotty McCreery

“American Idol’s” group portion of its winnowing process always is the most fascinating chapter of its yearly saga, as the singing competition briefly shifts into full reality show mode. I’ve never been convinced that it was a fair method to judge aspiring singers who were competing as solo acts, as it frequently results in superior vocalists being dumped because they couldn’t sing harmony, learn choreography and lyrics under pressure, or play well with others. I know you have to get that mass of ambition and ego reduced to 24 people somehow, but group day is the equivalent of throwing darts at a dartboard.

It makes for great ethics scenarios, though. The format guarantees it, as the contestants have to form groups of four or five in a cruel process reminiscent of choosing sides for pick-up baseball games, guaranteeing that some people will end up feeling like the fat kid who always gets chosen last, if at all.

Last night there were several featured ethics dramas, with the judges, as they have been all season, being less than consistent in their responses to them. Continue reading →

The Westminster Dog Show and the Benign Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tonight is the finale of the Westminster Dog Show. The show is always entertaining if you are dog lover and educational whether you are or not—what the heck is a Plott?–but it is also a strange epitome of what human beings will accept as fair and reasonable because of tradition alone. The pretense that the judging at this stage of the show, after the best of the individual breeds have been selected, is anything but deluded arbitrariness presented as scientific expertise is astounding, because so many intelligent people not only accept it, but accept it with good humor and certitude.

A Scottish Deerhound

The American Kennel Club has exacting standards for each breed, and its judges are well-trained and knowledgeable to be sure. The Group competitions and climactic Best of Show determination, however, are blatant exercises in the suspension of disbelief. It is a true apples vs. oranges extravaganza that the owners, crowd and commentators treat with the solemnity of a major Supreme Court ruling, yet has no more real meaning than a series of coin flips. Last night, for example, a Scottish deerhound, one of my favorite breeds, won the Hound Group. This meant that the Group’s judge determined, in a matter of minutes, that the winning deerhound was a better deerhound than the best long-haired dachshund was a long-haired dachshund. How? What does that even mean? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: New York Courts

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Bravo!

New York’s court officials have decided to bar New York’s elected judges from hearing cases involving lawyers and others who make major financial contributions to their campaigns. The New York Times reports that the new rule of the state court system will be announced this week by Jonathan Lippman, the state’s chief judge. “It is believed to be the most restrictive in the country, bluntly tackling an issue — money in judicial politics — that has drawn widespread attention,” said the paper.

The new rule decrees that “no case shall be assigned” by court administrators to a judge when the lawyers or any of the participants involved donated $2,500 or more in the preceding two years. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln: Abe on Lawyer Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

John Steele, on his essential blog, the Legal Ethics Forum, had the wit and wisdom to post Abraham Lincoln’s “Notes for a Law Lecture” today in commemoration of Abe’s birthday. I had been looking for an appropriate post for the occasion, and I cannot improve on John’s selection.  Written around 1850, it is as excellent a statement of what lawyers should aspire to in 2011 as it was when Lincoln was practicing, and it also confirms our 16th President’s eloquence, clarity of thought, and instincts for good.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln.

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Abraham Lincoln’s Notes for a Law Lecture Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “How Not To Promote Tolerance and Undersatnding of Muslim Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

From Jeff, a.k.a. King Kool, discussing a Muslim TV executive’s murder and beheading of his wife, who with him founded a New York tlevision channel aimed at promoting better understanding and less fear of Muslims:

“…This will certainly not promote tolerance, but in its own horrible way, it might promote understanding. On the one hand, all variety of men are capable of producing the sort of person who would sooner slay their significant other to avoid the shame of divorce. In a strange way, this just says that they’re just like anyone else.

On the other hand, the misogyny that is integral to some people’s practice of the religion is something that should be held to higher scrutiny. Continue reading →