I think lots of people just hate young people, what with their futures still ahead of them and all of the not being in horrible pain every time they move, and are just looking around for ways to call them weak or whiny.

And young people are the worst, except for old people and about half of middle-aged people.

When I was growing up, my mom would always ask my dad how come he didn't win all of his cases like Perry Mason. My dad would reply that if his clients were innocent, he'd always win.

I just read the Campos piece, which is as far as I'm willing to get into this whole thing. I don't think blurring the distinction between "criticizing someone' and 'hounding someone from their job' is a particularly honest way to discuss this. Are people not made of actual straw saying that no one can utter a word of criticism? His last bit about how we have to keep employment at will is just the worst kind of bullshit. Lots of places do not have employment at will -- even one state has gotten rid of it -- and civilization hasn't ground to a halt. (Well, doesn't look like it's ground to a halt.)

Isn't Campos the guy who used to give dietary advice?

From what I've read about the case, it's complicated by the fact that apparently Sullivan was a big fuckup as a house dean already -- there were all sorts of problems. At which point any discomfort relating to his representation of Weinstein was more of a last straw that a sole cause of his removal.

Lots of places do not have employment at will -- even one state has gotten rid of it -- and civilization hasn't ground to a halt.

I thought we were against at-will employment because it allowed for discrimination, not because civilization would grind to a halt.

I also think Campos isn't being quite as bad as you say. He's not speaking out against an end to at-will employment generally, I don't think. He seems to be more objecting to the idea that high status people somehow have implicit rights only to be discharged for good cause that the rest of us don't have. He's not clear, so you might be right about what he really thinks, but I don't think he quite said that.

I just read that paragraph from Campos. He wasn't talking about at-will employment generally, but rather suggesting it's a good standard for "high-level administrators" at universities. Which I don't know if this position qualified as, and equating the position with the president of Harvard as he does may be a reach, but it's a pretty limited claim at least.

7: At-will employment also jacks up employer bargaining power, so it would be bad even if there were no such thing as discrimination.

From what I've read about the case, it's complicated by the fact that apparently Sullivan was a big fuckup as a house dean already

I read that as well. I found it kind of annoying: if he was doing a lousy job then they should have removed him for doing a lousy job instead of waiting for some political controversy to use as cover.

My understanding was that he was doing a bad job and there had been complaints, but since the complaints had come from unimportant staff and not from students the higher administration didn't pay any attention to them until the political controversy came up. That is, there was good cause to remove them all along, but the causality isn't that they used the political controversy as an excuse, but rather that the political controversy caused them to notice that there were a lot of problems.

Also the obligatory Harvard alum: it's totally insane that minor local university news like this becomes a national controversy, and "faculty dean" is a really stupid name for the position.

Any phrasing along the lines of "losing his job" is a completely insane way to look at this situation. No one lost their job. This is like someone stepping down as chair of a department and becoming ordinary faculty, not at all like getting fired. He was a tenured professor last year, and he still is today.

I think everyone should be protected against arbitrary employment action. And that all legitimate complaints should be investigated, regardless of the social status of the complainant.

There was a Crimson article that had a lot of the details of his badness in the position- very much a with him or against him attitude, and resident advisors who complained about anything he did or didn't fully support him were forced out.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/10/winthrop-climate/
Also he wasn't fired, his contract as house master wasn't renewed, it's not like they escorted him out of his apartment.
This is the most Harvard thing ever though:
"At one point in 2016, more than half of the Winthrop resident tutor staff made a pact to leave the House in protest, though they ultimately stayed." Courage comrades! eh never mind.

On a related note, I've seen some LGM commenters argue for the view that no employment should be at will, so Sullivan should have the right to have his administrative position renewed, absent a for-cause basis for not doing so. This seems to me to be a very unrealistic position.

I don't think I'm misreading Campos, though, by looking at what the actual point is that he is responding to. I don't think eliminating at will employment is unrealistic in the least, and I don't think his illustration shows that it is.

11.2: Even stupider things from Nebraska have become national news. Or at least local news that shows up on the google newsfeed of people who go to Nebraska often. It's a culture war.

I think a ballot initiative for universal just-cause termination would change the California conversation in a positive way. (Not clear it's high up on the union agenda, although many good things are.)

Why would firing everybody help?

Justice for all.

They know what they've done.

11: yeah. Is this the role that used to be called House Master or the Senior Tutor position.

Title inflation is the best.

Winthrop was such a friendly House. I don't know when Sullivan joined.

Christ, that Atrios guy is an asshole. In a parallel universe he's running a Morning Zoo radio show and giving nicknames to local city council members.

The present threat, hung over every head, that if the moving finger settles on your tweet, parking space or disgruntled staff, your life and times will be scoured for offenses to be used to get you fired, seems rather like every other culture of denunciation.

21: House Master, I think. Looks like they changed it in 2016. At any rate, I endorse 12 upthread: first of all, House Master/Faculty Dean is a largely functionary position, as far as I ever noticed; it does mean dealing with paperwork issues for students in the House, but ... honestly, I'm with Atrios: representing Weinstein was Sullivan's third, voluntary job. Sorry if it conflicts with his second job, but it does.

Atrios is an asshole? Granted I don't check in there very often, but I didn't know this was a standing opinion.

Atrios can be very sarcastic sometimes, or even often. Some people don't like sarcasm; I'm surprised Flip would be bothered.

I expect one of the reasons this is news is because Weinstein has a PR team that ensures things like this get in the news, not that the market for outrage on behalf of men in privileged positions being able to have maximum latitude in all situations without question is a small one.

I remember a time when "But you're getting paid!" was regarded as a fairly weak attempt to impeach someone's integrity.

Atrios is Internet-sarcastic--a middle-aged edgelord--tough guy onscreen, less than two-dimensional behind his posture off.

It's a nice evening, first I can remember this year with nice weather and no pollen, and I'm on the patio drinking a beer. My mind keeps coming back to the deeper things, like how uncomfortable our patio furniture is.

Swedish people must have asses of iron.

Unlike decadent cosmopolitan Jewish people with their calves of gold.

House Master/Faculty Dean is a largely functionary position, as far as I ever noticed; it does mean dealing with paperwork issues for students in the House

It also sometimes involves repeatedly calling up professors and trying to convince them to give a student who has turned in literally zero work the entire semester a passing grade. Or, um, so I hear.

But thanks to your house master, you went on to a great career after a bad start.

Yglesias had a good take on the Sullivan thing, including pointing out how ridiculous it is that this sort of thing gets so much attention.

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Teo, send me an email?
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Done.

Thanks.

Didn't they change "House Master" to "Faculty Dean" as part of a wave of "rectifying the names" due to dislike of the word "master"?

6 and 11 fit with what I've heard and read. Sullivan's underlings didn't like him, and enough students didn't like him that it was a known issue, but being Harvard the administration didn't pay a lot of attention. The Weinstein defense thing gave the anti-Sullivan side enough extra ammunition to get rid of him in a genteel Harvard way.
14. There is one reporter at the Crimson (Avi-Yonah) who has been on his case for a while. The linked article and many earlier ones about Sullivan and Winthrop were all written by her (with various co-authors). Pro-Sullivan folks have described it as a personal vendetta.

A vendetta seems like too much effort to do if it isn't personal.

I'm surprised how little support there is here -- especially among lawyers -- for the obvious correct position: You don't penalize a lawyer for the clients he or she represents, as long as that representation is done in accordance with the law and legal norms. Kick the bastard out of his faculty dean role for being an asshole, not for representing a client. Forbid him from moonlighting if you want, but don't penalize him for his choice of clients.

The president of my (former) union was resentful of the lawyer hired by a previous administration. She argued that the lawyer's firm had represented companies against unions, and therefore should not be representing us. I always disagreed with that argument, and when it came time for that lawyer to represent me, he did a great job. After my case was won, there was some legal work to be done in the aftermath, and by then they had hired an ideologically correct lawyer who fucked up that part of my case. (I mean, goddammit,* I told him I shouldn't cash the check. He told me that doing so wouldn't prejudice my further claims. He was wrong.)

I do think that the union's choice was legit, even if I disagreed with it. A university ought to adhere to a different standard on these things, though, and certainly ought not be holding lawyers up to public vilification based solely on the clients they represent. Part of the Hillary hysteria was about her past representation of unsavory clients.

*Spellcheck flags "goddamit" and "godammit," but not "goddammit."

Interesting how the establishment of the state's monopoly on violence involves, on the one hand, the extermination of the mercenaries with arms, and on the other the valorization of the mercenaries with law degrees.

I'm surprised how little support there is here -- especially among lawyers -- for the obvious correct position: You don't penalize a lawyer for the clients he or she represents, as long as that representation is done in accordance with the law and legal norms.

I'm torn by this one. That is, there is some sense in which it's obviously correct, and another sense in which it isn't. I still think of myself as working out a certain amount of atonement for my Big Tobacco representation (along with various other bad people I represented, but Big Tobacco was the clearest issue), and I think that's right: I was working for bad people who do social harm because they paid me lots of money. I had the choice not to do that but it would have meant having less money, and I wanted the money. I don't think anyone else is required to treat that as a morally commendable or even neutral decision. And my Big Tobacco case, specifically, was pretty legally unexceptionable (that is, in the specific suit where I was defending them, I still think they were legally in the right); I don't feel bad about unethical lawyering I did, I feel bad about taking money obtained by killing people including my grandfather so that I could work to defend the interests of the entity that killed my grandfather.

Everyone is entitled to a lawyer, the lawyer's ethical obligations are to abide by the law and by the rules of professional ethics, no one should think that Sullivan is a bad or unethical lawyer for working for a bad client. But I don't think that means that people worried about coming to him about sexual assault are doing something wrong when they hold it against him that he chose to charge a whole lot of money to serve the interests of a serial predator.

I think the way to square that circle is that it is wrong to condemn a lawyer because of what their clients may have done in the sub judice case in question, but right to condemn them because of what their clients definitely did, just like with any other professional. If you go to work for Big Tobacco in any capacity, I'm judging you, because you knew they were Big Tobacco when you took the job. But if you go to defend someone accused of a horrible crime, that's fine because the whole point of you doing it is that they might be innocent.

43: Not really. The state exterminates principled rebels with arms with perhaps even more enthusiasm than mercenaries with arms. And in the capitalist system everybody is expected to be a mercenary in the general sense.

But if you go to defend someone accused of a horrible crime, that's fine because the whole point of you doing it is that they might be innocent.

That's not quite it either. Like, I did a (very tiny) bit of pro bono criminal defense when I was in law firms, and one thing I worked on was representing a guy who was definitely responsible for stealing that tractor-trailer load of toner cartridges and Blue's Clues branded children's sneakers: what I was doing was shepherding him through the guilty plea process. That was pro bono, but I wouldn't think anyone should think ill of me for representing that guy if I'd been doing it for the money, and the same even if he'd gone to trial despite his obvious guilt (there were hours of transcripts of the theft from another guy who was wearing a wire.)

I'm not sure at all how to reconcile this -- I have intuitions going in both directions.

Something for everyone on that truck.

46: Not not really. Extermination of principled rebels doesn't exclude extermination of armed mercenaries, the mercenarism of lawyers is not merely expected but elevated to a principle of professional ethics, and the mercenarism of the wage laborer is of much more recent vintage than the modern state or the English law.

Or, people who have a hard time voting for Kamala Harris because she was a prosecutor. I disagree with that in specific (I could change, but at this point, while I'm still vacillating, but I think she's my second choice after Warren), but I think it's legitimate -- even if a lawyer is acting ethically in terms of the lawyering they're doing, I think you can still judge them for their clients and the overall effect of that representation.

49: Sorry, I shouldn't have started this ridiculous argument.

No! It's fun! I bet someone here also knows relevant historical stuff!

I feel very weird talking to non-lawyers about 'ethics'. Because in a lawyering context, 'ethics', to me, means specifically professional ethics -- are you abiding by the rules? Not any abstract judgment about is what you are doing as a lawyer a good thing to do or morally right. And there has to be a word that means what 'ethics' means to a lawyer, you need to be able to distinguish 'professionally acceptable' from not. But saying that representation of any client in any matter is 'ethical' if you abide by the rules, so you shouldn't be judged for it, seems indefensible to me.

(My mother's cousin, or, rather, her dead cousin's husband, who she always referred to in conversation as 'My cousin [Joey] the mob lawyer', has been in the news lately. He's been an associate of Giuliani's since the eighties (maybe the seventies?) and was involved in some Trump-related message-passing. I don't know that he ever did an 'unethical' thing as a lawyer, but I'm comfortable thinking of him as a bad guy.)

The basic concept of legal representation being tied to ability to pay (with second-class or in-name-only representation for everybody else) more and more to me seems like an unfixably corrosive system. It would still be even if public defense and civil legal aid were properly funded.

I realize "what mechanism then decides which civil cases are worthy of a lawyer?" becomes fraught, but like with health care, any system would likely be better than the non-system we have now.

#lawyercare4all

That is, there is some sense in which it's obviously correct, and another sense in which it isn't.

Yeah, I get this. I was aiming in that general direction when I described the union's choice of representation as "legit." This is an exercise in line-drawing, and the precise location of the line is the subject of reasonable debate.

The decision of a prospective client to reject an attorney on these grounds seems within bounds to me.

But the decision of a university to publicly vilify an attorney for choosing to represent a client strikes me as falling on the bad side of that line. Harvard is providing an explicit lesson to its students: By definition, you can't trust an attorney who has represented the opposite side of an issue you are on.

The fact that this is sometimes true -- that you really can't trust those lawyers sometimes -- appears to be beside the point in this case. I'm not really following this closely, but I haven't seen any evidence that the lawyer involved has a history of poor treatment of victims of abuse.

(Yglesias's point -- that it would be wrong to judge the defender of a murderer this way, but okay to judge the defender of a sexual abuser this way -- is very clever, and it makes a point I hadn't considered, but I think it still falls short of excusing Harvard.)

Publicly vilify seems really overstated -- that is, I don't know that there's anything from Harvard that says anything negative about Sullivan's representation of Weinstein, and I'd bet there's either nothing or very little. The only negative judgment is a two-step process: (1) this specific job is one where it's important that the undergraduates have personal trust in you, and (2) for a whole bunch of reasons of which the Weinstein representation is only the last straw, the undergrads no longer have that sort of good personal relationship with Sullivan. I don't think taking the undergraduate reaction to Sullivan's representation of Weinstein into account is either illegitimate on Harvard's part or amounts to vilification.

a guy who was definitely responsible for stealing that tractor-trailer load of toner cartridges and Blue's Clues branded children's sneakers

I've atoned for my crime, LB, no need to drag me on the blog like this.

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I'm coming back to NY from May 31st to July 6. Meet up! Ajay are your dates for being in NYC confirmed?

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I should point out that some jurisdictions have ethical canons that posit a duty to represent unpopular and reviled clients.

And, of course, that one's skepticism about the importance of "trust" in the house master/faculty dean position is likely compromised: the Very Angry Young Flippanter hated (i) the house system, (ii) his house and (iii) the unseemly appetite of his then-friends to clamber onto the house and its administrative favorites.

56: This identifies the location of our disagreement, and clarifies where I'm drawing the line: The university's choice to dump Sullivan from that role (I contend) effectively adopts the dominant themes of the protesters -- who are themselves mistaken, I think, but acting within the legitimate realm of public discourse. (But again, my view changes if the protesters' complaint is broader than I understand it to be, and not specifically tied to Weinstein.)

60: I actually just found this out seconds ago looking up articles about this, but does it change matters that Sullivan has also spoken on behalf of, and may be representing, a Harvard faculty member accused of sexual harassment, and accused witnesses in that case of being coached?

61: Once you establish yourself as a public advocate, things like the nature of his PR efforts on behalf of Fryer become relevant, I think. Likewise, I can imagine him saying things publicly on behalf of Weinstein that could conflict with the Harvard role.

Anyway, IANAL, so personally, I am uncomfortable placing myself on the same side as the many nitwits who are publicly taking the same position (roughly, broadly) that I am.

It strikes me that there should always be redundancy when it comes to reporting abuse -- if the victim doesn't feel comfortable talking to person X, then they should be able to report to person Y. The cause of discomfort doesn't have to be X choosing to represent a particular paying client, it can as easily be familiarity with the perp, or that it's a guy, or anything.

Our local college has gotten burned beyond belief by dealing with abuse in-house, and has been encouraging victims of crimes to call the police.

It's not public vilification to terminate the guy's RA contract, but, doing it so publicly, and in response to a public campaign, is a validation of the charge that a person can't do job A and job B without incurable conflict. We can invent a million analogies to show that this is either untrue, or insufficient, in a great number of cases, to lead to termination.

You know, today's Supreme Court decision in the Arctic Man case isn't even OT. What is OT, but might end up being fascinating, is the play between Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor. Because it's a concurring opinion, Gorsuch came first, and God help me, I was nodding along saying holy shit this guy is making sense. Justice Sotomayor apparently did the same, mostly, and says so. Here's how I'd summarize their positions: they agree that the majority's standard is bogus, Gorsuch thinks district judges will fix it, on the fly in individual cases, and Sotomayor thinks that bad conduct is going to get excused in individual cases. They're both right, but because it's a constitutional issue, the "tie" -- that's a little overgenerous to Gorsuch -- goes to Sotomayor.

I'm underselling Justice Sotomayor's objections to Gorsuch here, I think. But she really called him out for compliments a lot, and especially for not joining Thomas' even-more-bogus-than-the-majority position.

63.4: What is this and should I know about it?

Thomas joined by the liberals, against the other conservatives in the removal case is also something. I mean, it's not surprising that this is what he thinks the statute means, or that the liberals are anti-removal in the consumer class action context. But here's a 5-4 decision that will confound the statisticians.

Also where are we with the census thing thanks in advance

65 Several decisions from the Supreme Court today. The Arctic Man case has to do with the standard for challenging a pretextual arrest where what they are really punishing is free and anti-police speech,. The removal case is about who can force the transfer of a civil case from the state court system to the federal court system.

Is this results week for the supreme court?

68: So what are the upshots?

I mean obviously I'm disappointed to my bones that it isn't a citizenship dispute involving a defrosted caveman, but you can't win them all right.

The first Monday of each week of the term, 9 am Central. Except this week it's Tuesday because of the holiday. Sometimes Thursdays too. There are people who can tell you exactly how many decisions are still out, and by having paid attention to who has written what on cases argued in any particular week/month of the term, offer informed speculation about who is going to be writing what that is yet to come.

I don't know what else was argued in the same week/month as the removal case, but the fact that Thomas was the author of the majority opinion suggests that he's not likely to get another majority opinion from that week/month. Any time Thomas isn't writing for the majority is a good time.

Isn't there sometimes a week when every day is a big decision? Maybe the last week of the session is what I'm thinking of.

70 Arctic Man is apparently the Alaska equivalent of Burning Man. Drunk guy gets arrested for disorderly conduct, files a civil suit.

Result: It's hard but not completely impossible (the standard Thomas wanted) to bring a civil suit for a bullshit retaliatory arrest, if there's actually probably cause for the arrest. Sotomayor has the winning hypothetical:

Put into practice, the majority's approach will yield arbitrary results and shield willful misconduct from accountability. As one example, suppose police respond to reports of a man prowling a front porch. The man says that he is a locked-out homeowner; the police want ID. The man alleges profiling; the officers insist they are just doing their jobs. Tempers flare. A passerby, stepping into a next-door neighbor's yard for a clearer view of the confrontation, pulls out a cell phone camera and begins streaming video of the encounter to her social media followers. One of the officers notices and orders the passerby to stop recording. When the passerby persists, the officer places the passerby under arrest for trespassing.

Will this citizen journalist have an opportunity to prove that the arrest violated her First Amendment rights? Under the majority's test, the answer seems to turn on
how many other curious bystanders she can identify who were not arrested in a situation like hers. If she was one of a crowd to enter the neighbor's yard that night, she can sue using her readily available comparator neighbors. But if she was keeping a lonely vigil, she is out of luck (unless she can find some other pool of comparable individuals). And the video of the officer demanding she stop recording moments before the arrest? Irrelevant, apparently. What sense does that make?

2d para should be italics

by which I mean last para

To make up for botching the formatting, and misspelling probable, here's the next paragraph of the Sotomayor decision:

Worse, because the majority disclaims reliance on "statements and motivations" for its threshold inquiry, ante, at 15, it risks licensing even clear-cut abuses. Imagine that a reporter is investigating corruption in a police unit. An officer from that unit follows the reporter until the reporter exceeds the speed limit by five miles per hour, then delivers a steep ticket and an explicit message: "Until you find something else to write about, there will be many more where this came from." Cf. Torries v. Hebert, 111 F. Supp. 2d 806, 812 (WD La. 2000) (describing allegations that a sheriff arrested proprietors of a local business and "threatened to arrest them again if they continued to play [rap] music"). If even such objectively probative evidence is irrelevant, §1983 will provide no redress for such flagrant conduct. Meanwhile, the majority's embrace of the Devenpeck rule suggests that a particularly brazen officer could arrest on transparently speech-based grounds and check the statute books later for a potential justification. See 543 U. S., at 153 (holding that probable cause need not be for an "offense actually invoked at the time of arrest").

And the footnote, because:

It is also unclear what the majority means when it says that because its threshold "inquiry is objective, the statements and motivations of the particular arresting officer are 'irrelevant.'" Ante, at 15. That could conceivably be read to mean that all statements are irrelevant, even objectively probative statements describing events in the world--e.g., "I am arresting the libertarians, but not the nonlibertarian protesters who were also trespassing." The facts asserted therein--that libertarians were arrested, nonlibertarians were not, and all were similarly trespassing--are precisely the kind of objective evidence the Court seeks. Similarly, routine police reports--on which the majority surely must intend for plaintiffs to rely--are generally authored by, and thus "statements of," arresting officers. More likely, then, the majority means only that statements describing the officer's internal thought processes are irrelevant (e.g., "I hate libertarians"). But many statements will fall somewhere in between (e.g., "I'm only arresting you because I hate libertarians"). It is hard to see how workable lines can be drawn here.

What jury would find for the plaintiff in such a case?

Probably just go by race.

So the court basically just it made it easier for the police to harass people arbitrarily?

And I'll guess didn't say a damn thing about the permissability of killing a dog to defrost your hands in 20 degrees of frost.

Thaw your hands. I ban myself for infelicity.

In the Ninth Circuit, literally yes, since they reversed that court in the case. It wasn't all that easy to recover from the police before.

I recently checked my privilege and it includes several pairs of gloves.

(Of course, all the media attention is going to be on the fetal remains case. This is pretty good down in the weeds on that, I think: https://twitter.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1133382812227330049)

That is a peculiar decision. I'm not going to go and read all the briefs, but I find it really hard to imagine that the parties never referenced the undue burden standard at all.

More coverage of the Arctic Man case.

86: There was an essay on the occasion of Kennedy's retirement, I can't find it now, but it discussed his tendency to indulgently dive into his own rabbit holes of de novo reasoning and refusing to work off others' frameworks or build his own. For example, upholding gay marriage without ever assigning a level of scrutiny for LGBT-related legislation.

Maybe this is catching on?

Now I've seen more than one person speculating about the removal case: because Alito's dissent was more than twice as long as Thomas' majority opinion, maybe when they started out, Alito was writing for the majority, but somewhere along the line someone flipped.

88: posted here I think?

53, belatedly: Yes, law needs to do something like international trade did when they changed the term of art from "most-favored nation" to "normal trade relations." The former had arisen within a historical context, and everyone professionally involved with the topic knew that the latter is actually what was meant, but to outsiders and laypersons, it looked terrible.

Not automatically renewing China's most-favored nation status sounds like a gimme to someone who only pays sporadic attention to international relations. But not renewing normal trade relations is much less of a gimme.

So yes, a different term could (marginally) improve outsiders' understanding of lawyers, as well as lawyers' collective image, without necessarily requiring a substantive change.

But pls disregard because analogies are banned.

I feel very weird talking to non-lawyers about 'ethics'. Because in a lawyering context, 'ethics', to me, means specifically professional ethics

I remember many years ago reading Mike Royko's column on Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer in 1980 for stories on an eight-year-old heroin addict, but was later revealed to have made the story up. I can't find the Royko column itself, but he noted that the reporter, in exchange for access, had promised to protect the identity of "Jimmy," his caretakers and others involved.

I can't find the text of the Royko piece, but my memory is that it discussed journalistic ethics, and how commitments to protect the identity of a source are considered sacrosanct. I found this excerpt online:

I'll tell you what I would have done if I had been the editor and a young reporter came to me with that same story. I would have said something like this:

I want the name of the kid now. I want the name of the mother. I want the name of the guy giving the kid heroin. We're going to have that sonofabitch put in jail, and we're going to save that kid's life. After we do that, then we'll have a story.

The Post argued that having access to people's stories enabled reporters to write about people like Jimmy, and the reporter couldn't have covered the story -- or stories like it -- without credibly making that promise. That seems like a judgment well within normal journalistic ethics. Royko, though, was making a point about the distinction between "ethics" and "professional ethics," and I think he was right that professional ethics are secondary.

92: Though that particular case doesn't present a clean experiment in that the Post was totally failing in a higher professional obligation, to fact-check its stories.

And I don't think professional ethics are secondary in any straightforward way. Being utilitarian, I say professional principles can trump common sense principles if in a particular case obedience to professional ethics will yield a better overall outcome. So, if there were in fact an epidemic of 8 y.o. heroin addicts the public would need to know about it, and not handing a drug pusher to the police might be an acceptable price for achieving that.

93: Royko's point (as I recall it) was that the professional failure would have been irrelevant had the editors adhered to common-sense ethics.
94: I'll accept that amendment and agree that professional ethics can be secondary.

Except if your profession is ethicist.

Right. Professional ethics are kind of binary -- this is permitted or it is not allowed. General morality, there are lots of gray areas. Sometimes there's going to be something that's professionally permitted but is not a terrific thing to do, but within the range of things that people do for money without being thought of as terrible people (like, oh, say, representing tobacco companies); sometimes there's going to be something that's professionally permitted but is a terrible thing to do, and then you've got a conflict; sometimes there's going to be something that's professionally forbidden but required by ordinary morality (the Royko heroin-kid problem). Professional ethics doesn't do a lot to resolve ordinary moral problems.

On the branding issue, we call them the rules of professional responsibility.

Is one obliged to get one of those remote laser-pointy thermometers, or can you just judge by the color of the iron?

451F