open forums

Friday Open Forum! Yum!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This week’s forum will be sandwiched between Parts 1&2 of a September clean-up. So many delicious ethics stories and issues have floated or crawled by recently—and the volume seems to be increasing—that I’m desperately trying to reduce the backload. And the hits just keep on coming: I woke up to an alert that Senator Feinstein had died, an ethics story in itself. Evoking memories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most selfish and irresponsible conduct as President, Feinstein was willing to wither and die in office rather than give up her power and position when it was clear that the Reaper was knocking.

Last night, ethics actually kept me awake: the last post was typed out around 5 am. I’m hoping the contributions to the Forum will let me take an early nap.

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun,This Forum Makes Two In A Week, Not Just One!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…

What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…

Friday Forum, Open For Business

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

It’s come to this.

I’m playing “The Learned Judge” in a lightly staged concert version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury” this weekend at the Georgetown Law Center. (That’s a different production of the show above.) The cast is made up of current students and alums from the past 50 years. Gilbert’s resolution of the musical law suit in which a jilted bride is suing a rogue for breach of promise of marriage is that the judge (me) decides to marry the plaintiff himself, a decision that she is delighted with. In announcing this “judgment,” I came down to the young woman, a first year law student, playing the plaintiff “Angelina” and placed my arm around gently around her waist, then transitioned to holding her hands in mine as we sang the final bars of the show.

The director asked that I only place my hand on Angelina’s shoulder rather than around the waist, because the production might be criticized for endorsing sexual harassment.

But you all chat about whatever ethics matters are making your lives interesting, exciting, or miserable.

Labor Day Weekend Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

As is usual on holiday weekends around here, the tumbleweeds will be blowing through the cyber-streets no matter what fascinating ethical conundrums I can find. Nevertheless, perhaps the few, those happy few, can make up in quality here what EA will almost certainly lack in quantity.

We shall see, will we not?

You’re up!

Friday Open Forum, With A Question…

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

A few posts fewer than usual this week, even after (mostly) being relieved from the burden of dealing with last week’s paired “Attack of the Trolls” and “The Return of the Banned Commenters.” Sorry. Maybe today’s Open Forum can cover some of the important ethics topics I missed.

I’ve been laboring over a tricky ethics report on a tough issue, and it has literally been keeping me awake at night. I did have a “Eureka!” moment yesterday, while walking Spuds. Does that make any part of my dog-walking duties legitimately billable time?

Meanwhile, the various pundits on the Left and Right—are there any from the center?—all are annoying me. I’ve encountered several conservative writers who can’t resist mocking Chris Christie’s weight while attacking him on other grounds. (“Just drop out and get back to the buffet,” one advises the former N.J. governor this morning.) On the other side of the great divide, Charles M. Blow, arguably the biggest asshole in the New York Times stable of them, actually wrote a column rationalizing the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama, in which a mob of blacks attacked a handful of whites who were arguing, then fighting, with a riverboat co-captain who was trying to clear a berth for his vessel. Since the man is black, this made the the episode presumptively a racist incident, though there is no evidence that the same jerks who attacked Damien Pickett wouldn’t have behaved in exactly the same, Cro-Magnon manner if he had been white like them. Wrote Blow: “Black people coming to the defense of that Black man wasn’t just a specific thing that happened at one place and time; it was also a departure, in some ways, from the most memorable images in a history that includes centuries of Black-targeted brutality, which traces the journey of Black people in this land that became the United States.”

Is everybody an asshole?

Dog Days Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

I had momentarily forgotten that the blog hits its non-holiday traffic nadir during the so-called “dog days of summer,” which officially occur between July 3 and August 11 every year. I am optimistic that the many looming issues out there along with EA’s loyal and alert commentariat can fight the tide a bit.

We shall see…

Open Ethics Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

(And I haven’t even had time to read what you entered in the last one…)

This has been a genuinely rotten seven days for your host on all fronts including Ethics Alarms, where readership was down even considering the two-day interruption when my PC was fried. There weren’t even Red Sox games to take my mind off of more substantive matters, since this was All-Star Game week, and baseball’s All-Star Game is just one more piece of evidence of societal ethics rot. It used to have integrity and be played like a real game by the best in the sport; now the thing has all the authenticity of a company picnic softball game.

Oh…there was one bit of silver lining: Remember this post? To my shock and amazement, the organization reversed itself and asked me to do a new ethics seminar under its auspices. I had emailed a letter of protest to the Executive Director the same day I blogged about being fired for telling the truth; I did not apologize. The letter included the same points I made here: I said directly that the decision was not only unfair and unprofessional, but that as Continuing Legal Education providers, the company was ethically obligated to make every effort to get lawyers back in the classroom where training is more likely to be effective. I assumed that this would be the last contact I had with it.

And they reversed their decision. Having refused to grovel and held to my principles when faced with the negative consequences of a stand too many times to count over the years (a habit acquired from Jack Marshall, Sr.), I did not anticipate this result.

There is hope.