How Corruption Erodes Public Trust, 9/8/09

[Charleston Chew]

Run time: 02:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HumMyN0Q8Gc   Posted on YouTube: October 30, 2009 By YouTube Member: ForaTv Views on YouTube: 5011   Posted on DU: December 27, 2010 By DU Member: Charleston Chew Views on DU: 249

 
How Corruption Erodes Public Trust - Lawrence Lessig

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/08/Lawrence_Lessig_on_Institutional_Corruption

Lawrence Lessig argues that regardless of how money actually affects policy, the mere perception of impropriety is damaging to our political system. "More people supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today," he jokes.

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Larry Lessig introduces the Safra lecture series with a discussion on institutional corruption.

He explores the prevalence of this form of corruption in fields ranging from politics to medicine to journalism, and describes his plan to study and contain this problem. - Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago.

He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. For much of his career, he has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright.

Recognized for arguing against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online, he is CEO of the Creative Commons project, and he has been a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and The Industry Standard.

[midnight]

1. Corruption is a big problem in Wisconsin Courts....

Lawyers as johns, and judges as prostitutes? Across the United States, attorneys (“johns,” as the analogy goes) are giving campaign money to judges (“prostitutes”) and then asking those judges for legal favors in the form of rulings for themselves and their clients. Despite its pervasiveness, this practice has been rarely mentioned, much less theorized, from the attorneys’ ethical point of view. With the surge of money into judicial elections (e.g., Citizens United v. FEC), and the Supreme Court’s renewed interest in protecting justice from the corrupting effects of campaign money (e.g., Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.), these conflicting currents and others will force the practice to grow both in its pervasiveness and in its propensity to debase our commitment to actual justice and the appearance of justice. This Article takes, in essence, the first comprehensive look at whether attorneys’ campaign contributions influence judicial behavior and our confidence in the justice system (they do), whether contributions have untoward systemic effects (again, they do), and most fundamentally, whether attorneys act ethically when they contribute to judges before whom they appear (they do not, all else being equal).

The growing rift between liberal and conservative justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has once again caused indecision. This time, the issue was whether Justice Gableman should be disciplined for the misleading advertisement that his campaign committee aired against former Justice Butler. Butler had long ago been a public defender, represented a criminal defendant on appeal, won at the court of appeals level, but lost at the supreme court level. The client then served his time, but regrettably committed another serious offense after he was released from prison. From these facts, the campaign committee somehow crafted the following television attack ad, which Justice Gableman reviewed and approved: “Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street. Like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities. Butler found a loophole. Mitchell went on to molest another child.”

In short, the three liberal justices found disciplinable conduct in the ad’s misleading speech (opinion, here); the three conservative justices found the ad “distasteful” but not disciplinable (opinion, here). Now, the judicial conduct authorities do not know what to do with this tie.

This same three-three split occurred recently in the much-followed case of State v. Allen, in which a criminal defendant moved to disqualify Gableman (in part for the remarks above). The resulting deadlock meant that the motion to disqualify was effectively denied. And as a final example, the split essentially caused the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s anomalous Caperton response (or more accurately, nonresponse); see earlier post for details.





http://judicialethicsforum.com/category/judicial-disqualification-recusal/

What is going on in our Law Schools?