“Three partners at the [law] firm and its chief financial officer are majority owners of a mail-order pharmacy in the Philadelphia suburbs that has teamed up with a secretive network of doctors that prescribes unproven and exorbitantly priced pain creams to injured workers — some creams costing more than $4,000 per tube…. These sorts of doctor- and lawyer-owned pharmacies are largely unknown outside of the local workers’ comp industry and are not fully understood even within legal and medical communities, because the lawyers and physicians behind them have kept a low profile or sought to conceal their ownership….Clients who click through to the pharmacy’s website are told: ‘Focus on your recovery. Let us handle the fine print.'” [William Bender, Philadelphia Daily News]
Posts Tagged ‘ethics’
May 31 roundup
- “Heir hunters” chase missing relatives entitled to inherit unclaimed fortunes, for a share of the recovery. Some relatives might not even be relatives [James Fanelli, New York Daily News first, second stories]
- Put up a statue of Clarence Darrow for the Scopes case? OK, but then take it back down for the L.A. Times case [Mark Pulliam, Law and Liberty]
- Lawyer who founded Prenda Law is disbarred [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]
- “Escaping the ICWA Penalty Box: In Defense of Equal Protection for Indian Children” [Timothy Sandefur, Children’s Legal Rights Journal]
- “Russian bank owners sue BuzzFeed over Trump dossier publication” [Josh Gerstein, Politico]
- On OMB regulatory management, Trump administration is headed in its own new direction [Andrew Grossman]
“Lawyer submitted bills for working over 24 hours in a day. Twice.”
“West Virginia’s top court imposed a two-year suspension on a lawyer who submitted bills for court-appointed work for more than 24 hours a day on two different occasions.” [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]
Please advise IBM of any mint issues
A tweet by Robert Swirsky:
Amused by this lengthy disclaimer in front of a bowl of mints at an NAB booth. "It's needed for compliance" they said. @overlawyered pic.twitter.com/KSdOHUb21Q
— (((Thrill Science))) (@ThrillScience) April 25, 2017
A followup photo includes the fateful mint jar. In subsequent discussion, attorney Peter Orlowicz points out that general federal ethics regulations “exclude modest items of food/refreshments from the definition of ‘gift’; it’s not clear that IBM was being over-cautious, though, given that supplementary agency regulations as well as state and local regulations have been known to go further than the general federal standard.
Bar ethics complaint against Kellyanne Conway
Fifteen professors recently filed a misconduct complaint against Kellyanne Conway with a D.C. bar disciplinary committee over things she has said in support of President Trump. Prominent legal ethicist Steve Lubet argues — and I agree — that this “dangerously misguided” complaint would set a terrible precedent if it somehow succeeded. Last week Paul Alan Levy, the First Amendment lawyer with Public Citizen, came to the same conclusion: bar panels have no business going after people who happen to be lawyers over their political speech. The complaint is an irresponsible stunt, and should be tossed out ASAP. More: Maya Noronha, Fed Soc Blog.
Trump’s business interests and the Emoluments Clause
Given the complex ongoing dealings between the Trump Organization and foreign governments, the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution will require Congress to “decide what it is willing to live with in the way of Trump conflicts” — and it should draw those lines before the fact, not after. That’s what I argue in a new Philadelphia Inquirer piece. Excerpt:
…Trump points out that the president is exempt from the conflict-of-interest laws that bind Congress and the judiciary, but that doesn’t mean he will escape scrutiny from public opinion or from the body of federal law as a whole, including the Emoluments Clause.
That clause reads in relevant part: “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] , shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”…
The wording of the clause itself points one way to resolution: Congress can give consent, as it did in the early years of the Republic to presents received by Ben Franklin and John Jay. …
…it can’t be good for America to generate a series of possible impeachable offenses from a running stream of controversies about whether arm’s-length prices were charged in transactions petty or grand. …
There is no doubt that doing the right thing poses genuine difficulties for Trump not faced by other recent presidents. If he signals that he understands the nature of the problem, it would not be unreasonable to ask for extra time to solve it.
For more detail, Randall Eliason has a helpful explainer, e.g. on why Emoluments Clause issues do not map well onto the concept of “bribery.” (Bribery is subject to a separate ban, while both presents and some other payments can violate the Emoluments Clause even if given and received with the purest of motives.)
Update: With Trump’s announcement this morning that he intends to step back from management involvement with the Trump Organization, I’ve adapted this post into a longer piece at Cato at Liberty on what comes next. I quote Prof. Bainbridge, who’s got a second round of observations here.
Yet more: memos shed light on how the Department of Justice has construed the obligations of the Emoluments Clause over many decades. And the Washington Examiner, which recently welcomed Tim Carney as new opinion editor, suggests an “occluded trust.”
When young Hillary Clinton defended an accused rapist
Although she’s gotten blasted a lot about it, the “criticisms are (mostly) wrong and the defenses are (mostly) right,” argues Ken White at Popehat. On similar themes: Mirriam Seddiq, Not Guilty No Way, and Jonathan Adler/Volokh in 2014.
Where a conflict of interest policy for prosecutors would have helped
The city of Woodbury, Minn. employs a local law firm on contract to “prosecute certain criminal matters on the City’s behalf.” Lawyers from this firm filed a criminal action against Mr. Sample over an alleged domestic assault even as, at the same time, the firm was representing his alleged victim in civil actions including a restraining order. It “later asked another firm to prosecute the criminal case against Sample [on the grounds] that it had a conflict of interest.” Mr. Sample’s later section 1983 suit alleged that the law firm’s dual role at the time of the filing had violated his constitutional rights; the Eighth Circuit ruled that the prosecutors themselves enjoyed absolute personal immunity, but — such immunity not extending to towns — ordered further consideration of Sample’s claim that the town should be liable for not instituting a conflict-of-interest policy that would have headed off the problem before it happened. [Sample v. City of Woodbury et al.]
Lester Brickman retires
A giant in legal ethics and torts scholarship, Lester Brickman is retiring after 51 years teaching [Cardozo School of Law, his Wikipedia entry and tag here]
“My inference is that the ABA wants to … limit lawyers’ expression of viewpoints that it disapproves of.”
Eugene Volokh on troubling implications for speech of the American Bar Association’s new adoption of rules declaring it a professional responsibility violation for lawyers to express bias in various ways, including in the course of “law-related social activities.” More: ABA Journal, Ron Rotunda/WSJ, Stephen Bainbridge.