G.O.P Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul has pulled off a record-worthy achievement: he has earned Ethics Dunce status twice in a week’s time, something no one else, even serial Ethics Dunces like Sen. John Kerry and Tom DeLay, were able to do in the nearly seven years the designation has been in existence. He did not earn it the old fashioned way, however, as the old Smith-Barney ads used to say. Most Ethics Dunces do something, but in both cases Paul has proven himself worthy by what he says he believes. This makes him kind of a classic Ethics Dunce. He literally doesn’t understand basic ethical values, or if he does, can’t articulate them. Continue reading
The Golden Rule
Ethics for Bureacracies—On An Index Card
Ethicist Bob Stone has proposed a useful and perceptive solution to the perplexing problem of lax ethics in government bureaucracies. Calling on them to adopt “a strong sense of mission and a culture of trust, with authority and responsibility shifted from the few at the top to the many front-line workers,” Stone declares that too often “what passes for ethics is merely another set of rules to comply with, and ethics training usually consists of badgering workers about bribery, conflict of interest and favoritism.”
As a solution, Bob proposes a statement of ethical principles, so brief that it would easily fit on an index card:
I will:
- Do my best at work
- Avoid conflict of interest
- Speak truth to power
- Be a good citizen
- Shun any private gain from my employment
- Act impartially
- Treat others the way I would like to be treated
- Report waste, fraud, and corruption
When in doubt, my test is can I explain my actions to my mother or to my child.
Stone recommends that leaders and managers customize this to their own organizations, print it, distribute it, and then–and this is the most important part—regularly use events and decisions to discuss ethical lessons and principles with the staff, using the Statement of Principles as the starting point.
You can read his entire essay here. I recommend it. Bob has a long and distinguished background in that Mother of All Bureaucracies, the Pentagon. He knows what he’s talking about.
Ethics Hero: New York Met Jason Bay
Sometimes all it takes to be an Ethics Hero is being nice, especially if it’s in a way that most people like you have abandoned.
New Mets left fielder Jason Bay has moved to Larchmont, New York, where his presence is causing something of a buzz among the residents, especially the younger baseball fans. Gabriel Tugendstein, who is 11, was especially excited, and here we defer to his mother, writing in the New York Times… Continue reading
The Ethics Of Harvard’s “Racist E-mail” Scandal
The whole sad, sordid story of a Harvard Law student’s racially provocative e-mail that is now circling the web like the deadly virus in The Stand can be read over at Above the Law. The simple facts are these: At a dinner discussion at Harvard Law School, a law student expressed openness to the possibility of future research showing that blacks were, as a group, genetically inferior to whites in intellectual ability. After dinner, she made a fateful decision to elaborate on her views in an e-mail to two “friends” who had been involved in the discussion.
The e-mail said, in part…
“…I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair…” Continue reading
Complaint Ethics, With A Dash of Bias
My wife had to deliver some documents to my son’s school, one of those large mega-magnet schools that are locked up tighter than Alcatraz during school hours to keep out drug-dealers, assassins, and street mimes. After being blocked at “Entrance One” by a big guy in shades and a starter jacket (he looked like a club bouncer), she was sent to “Entrance Two.” There she encountered another security obstacle, a desk commanded by an imposing looking woman. There were four others seeking access. One of them, a suited gentleman, presented identification. One was identified by the woman at the desk as someone “who went to school here last year,” and he was allowed to pass the checkpoint on her recognizance alone. Another woman, who said she was a parent, also said was there to pick up something. She had no I.D., however “I’m not going to make you go back for your purse,” she was told. “Go on in.” My wife, also without her purse, was told she did have to present I.D., and had to hike back to the car and return with her driver’s license.
Should my wife report this arbitrary and obviously flawed execution of security procedures to school administrators? And a harder question..
Should she make an issue of the fact that both the woman at the desk and the parent she allowed to pass without I.D. were African American, and my wife is not? Continue reading
Tea Party Vengeance
What possible justification can there be for setting out to get someone fired for expressing a private opinion, however crude or confrontational? Vengeance isn’t a justification. Intimidation isn’t a justification. Neither is “because I can.” Causing someone to lose his or her job as retribution for legal conduct with no connection to that job is meanness for the sake of meanness, bullying, and a bright-line violation of the Golden Rule.
This is what the head of a prominent Tea Party organization did to Lance Baxter. Continue reading
When Blind Justice Blinds Love: the Saga of the Gambling Grannies
I’m sure you, like me, are eagerly anticipating the resolution of the case in New Britain Connecticut, in which one elderly sister is suing the other for a share of a 2005 Powerball jackpot of a half million dollars. The result, however, will be determined by technical legal issues, such as whether thee was there a valid contract between the sisters to split all gambling winnings, as the suing sis insists. There has already been one interesting wrinkle: gambling contracts are typically unenforceable, and so was this one until it applied to Powerball, which is state lottery and therefore, unlike other gambling in Connecticut, legal…just one more little bonus from of state governments taking over the numbers racket.
Yet the more important question, for those of us other than the sisters, Rose Bakaysa and her younger sister Theresa Sokaitis, is why some application of ethical values didn’t stop the lawsuit from getting to court. The situation is this: Rose and Theresa were always close, and in their retirement, the two began gambling regularly, taking trips to casinos and playing the lottery. They made a deal, years ago (Rose is 87 and Theresa is 84) that if either of them won anything, they would split it 50-50.
In 2004, right before Rose hit the jackpot, the sisters had an argument over–what else?—some money, and stopped speaking to each other. Rose tore up the notorized contract, but Theresa kept it safe, just in case. This is why they are in court. Continue reading
Apology: How I Became an April Fool and an Ethics Dunce
I’m not going to spin this. My conviction that the web hoax engineered by trial lawyer/blogger Eric Turkewitz violated the legal ethics rules was the product of a toxic mix of factors, prime among then being that I didn’t review my own files. When I finally, after nearly two days of answering complaints when I should have been hitting the books, checked the Rules of an ethics bellweather state that I often work in but had not for longer than usual, I read this:
RULE 8.4 Misconduct
It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to:
…(c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation which reflects adversely on the
lawyer’s fitness to practice law;
This is an unusual version of Model Rule 8.4; indeed, the only other state to have adopted it (I think—I am no longer sure of much) is Wyoming. Yet it is a very useful variation of the Model Rule, because it eliminates all ambiguity about whether “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” is meant to be as sweeping as it sounds. This formulation makes it clear that non-legal practice violations are covered, but that they have to reflect adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law to qualify.
I had been wallowing in obscure clues from other jurisdictions–Tennessee, for example, which has the ABA wording but an odd Comment that begins…
[4] Paragraph (c) prohibits lawyers from engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. Such conduct reflects adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law…
This could be taken to mean that all such conduct reflects adversely on fitness. The problem is, I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe that Tennessee means that.
The 8.4 version that I found was from…Virginia. Where I live. Where I have done more ethics CLE than anywhere else, beginning before the state even adopted the Model Rules format. Seeing this, two conclusions were unavoidable:
1. This is the predominant way jurisdictions think about 8.4. No state has rejected Virginia’s approach, and several have referenced it in Legal Ethics Opinions on the topic of what kind of non-legal practice-related conduct is covered by the Rules—-not subject to discipline, as I was arguing the past two days, but covered at all. The D.C. Bar has such an LEO, number 323, from 2004. I had a copy on file. The District of Columbia, where I’m a member of the bar.
2. I had made a big and inexcusable mistake, and compounded it by acting like the King of the Jerkwads. Continue reading
Accountability, the Phoebe Prince Suicide, and the Golden Rule’s Limitations
Sometimes the application of the Golden Rule actually leads us away from an ethical result.
The suicide of a 15-year-old South Hadley, Mass girls who had been the victim of bullying and web attacks by fellow students continues to be framed as the failure of school administrators to protect the girl. What the school knew and when they knew it is the object of current investigation and controversy, but there is an inherent public and media bias in such cases that is rooted in laudable ethical motivations, indeed, it is rooted in the Golden Rule. But that bias often results in unfairness and injustice. Continue reading
Art Ethics: We Are Not Bowls of Fruit
During his legendary questioning by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial, Williams Jennings Bryan famously answered one of Darrow’s queries by saying, “I don’t think about things I don’t think about.” (Darrow’s rejoinder: “Do you think about the things you do think about?”) One of the ethical issues I hadn’t thought about was whether an artist drawing a subject in public without his or her consent is being unethical. Thanks to a post by an inquiring artist on an art blog who heard the faint ringing of an ethics alarm in his head, I’m thinking about it now, and it is trickier than you might think.
Once the artist starts rolling, he has a lot of ethics questions: Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 