Legal Ethics Forum

New Co-Authored Article: Attorneys' Career Dissatisfaction in the New Normal

As readers are aware, there has been a great deal of speculation concerning legal careers in the post-recession period.  To fill a gap in the empirical literature, Gabriele Plickert (Sociology-Cal Poly Pomona) and I have been working on a project that examines lawyers' incomes and career satisfaction using data from active members of the State Bar of Texas.  Here is the abstract for our first piece, Attorneys' Career Dissatisfaction in the New Normal:

The 2008 economic recession had a seismic impact on the legal profession. This Article is the first to empirically assess whether the recession has made law an unsatisfying career.

Relying on survey data from over 11,000 active members of the State Bar of Texas, we find that only 13.5% of all attorneys and 11.5% of full-time attorneys are dissatisfied with their careers. Newer attorneys report greater career dissatisfaction than more experienced attorneys, yet they too are largely satisfied.

We also determine using logistic regression that three factors are highly predictive of lawyers’ career dissatisfaction: 1) comparatively low incomes; 2) working in private practice as opposed to in government or in a non-profit/public interest setting; and 3) law firm employment in a non-partnership role. Law school debt and lower class rank have only minor effects on career dissatisfaction whereas race, gender, years of practice experience, practice area, and firm size have no independent effects.

The article also highlights the unique challenges faced by attorneys who began their careers in and around the recession. Comments are welcome!

*AccessLex provided generous grant support for this project.

 

 

 

Stealing Is Stealing, Even in the Name of Art

[Cross-posted from The Faculty Lounge]

It is almost impossible to imagine, but an Israeli art student made six trips to Auschwitz for the purpose of stealing artifacts, which she then fashioned into an exhibit at one of Israel's leading art schools.  As reported by Liel Leibovitz at Tablet, a graduating student named Rotem Bidas took "small tin pots, a metal screw, a few shards of glass, even a sign warning visitors against removing any artifacts from the museum’s grounds" for use in her senior project at Beit Berl College. Bidas, who is the grand-daughter of Holocaust survivors, explained that her goal was to show how "morality is something that changes from time to time and from culture to culture.”  In an interview with the Israeli website Ynet, she explained that “Millions of people were murdered according to the moral laws of a certain country, under a certain regime. And if those are their laws, I can come up with my own laws."

Remarkably, Bidas's teachers approved of the project, going so far as to praise her for creating "an irreproducible encounter with a past event that has been shrouded in many layers of words, symbols, and representations.”  According to Bidas's advisor, "she didn't steal, but rather took an artifact through which she could become a partner . . . She tries to wound the conventional system of representations."

Both Bidas and her teachers apparently need a reminder, so here it is: No, you cannot come up with your own laws. And you certainly cannot desecrate one of the most important historical sites in Europe just to make a point about shifting morality. 

There is nothing about one's status as an artist -- or an ethnographer, for that matter, as readers of The Faculty Lounge may recall -- that justifies serious criminality. Stealing from Auschwitz is wrong in virtually every conceivable way -- legally, religiously, morally, ethically, historically, and probably even artistically. Bidas is evidently an undergraduate, and young people are often given to bad judgment, but there is no excuse for her faculty enablers.  You are free if you wish to make your own sacrifices for art, but you have no right to damage even the smallest remnant of the Holocaust.

The Ethics of Peer Review

[cross-posted from The Faculty Lounge]

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was established in the UK by academic journal editors, and it now has members around the world.  Among other activities, COPE publishes an extensive set of Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, which runs to five pages.  It covers accepting and declining reviews, confidentiality and timeliness during the review, the content of the report, and expectations post review.  Here are some of the provisions:

Peer reviewers should:

 

• only agree to review manuscripts for which they have the subject expertise required to carry out a proper

assessment and which they can assess in a timely manner.

 

• respect the confidentiality of peer review and not reveal any details of a manuscript or its review, during

or after the peer-review process, beyond those that are released by the journal.

 

• declare any potentially conflicting or competing interests (which may, for example, be personal, financial,

intellectual, professional, political or religious), seeking advice from the journal if they are unsure whether

something constitutes a relevant interest.

 

• decline to review if they feel unable to provide a fair and unbiased review.

 

• decline to review if they have been involved with any of the work in the manuscript or its reporting.

 

• decline to review if asked to review a manuscript that is very similar to one they have in preparation or

under consideration at another journal.

 

• be specific in their criticisms, and provide evidence with appropriate references to substantiate general

statements such as, ‘this work has been done before’, to help editors in their evaluation and decision

and in fairness to the authors.

 

•  remember it is the authors’ paper and not attempt to rewrite it to their own preferred style if it is

basically sound and clear; suggestions for changes that improve clarity are, however, important.

 

• not suggest that authors include citations to the reviewer’s (or their associates’) work merely to

increase the reviewer’s (or their associates’) citation count or to enhance the visibility of their or their

associates’ work; suggestions must be based on valid academic or technological reasons.

 

There are dozens more of these provisions. There is an admonition, for example, to "be objective and constructive in their reviews, refraining from being hostile or inflammatory and from making libellous or derogatory personal comments," and another to "recognize that impersonation of another individual during the review process is considered serious misconduct." (UK spelling of "libellous" is in original.)

 

It seems obvious that problems arise in peer review -- such as libel and impersonation -- that we just don't see in law reviews.  

 

You can read the entire COPE Ethics Code here.

 

Questions about Prof. Michael Sharpe's "St Cross Special Ethics Seminar" at Oxford University

I have a guest post today at the Virology Blog about Dr. Michael Sharpe's recent presentation on ethics, ME/CFS, and "the future of science," which I have copied in full below:

On 1 June 2017, Professor Michael Sharpe presented the “Special Ethics Seminar” at Oxford University’s St Cross College. In his posted abstract, he asserted that “some areas of scholarship are politicised (U.K. spelling in original),” including “the role of psychiatric or psychological approaches in the treatment” of ME/CFS patients. Sharpe also likened ME/CFS patients to climate change deniers, claiming:

The use of such co-ordinated pressure group action against science was prominently seen in the field of climate change research but is now emerging in other areas. 

Chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME for short) is one of these. 

The analogy is obviously aimed at critics of the PACE trial, of which Professor Sharpe was a principal investigator, but it is inaccurate, unfair, and insulting.  First, of course, there is a nearly universal consensus among scientists about the reality of climate change, supported by many decades’ worth of objective data, which places deniers among extreme outliers who are impervious to evidence. Sharpe’s theory that ME/CFS can be reversed through Cognitive Behavior Therapy and graded exercise, on the other hand, is shared within his own working group and accepted by many in the U.K. medical establishment, but it has been rejected or disregarded by highly credentialed researchers and scientists at major universities in the U.S., including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of California at Berkeley, among others.

More significantly, climate change denial has been backed by powerful political and economic forces – including oil companies and their allies – that have ulterior financial interests in preventing government environmental regulation. Criticism of the PACE trial, for the most part, has originated among patients whose life experience has caused them to question the validity of Sharpe’s approach, but who otherwise have no interest other than the search for an effective treatment. 

To put it starkly, President Donald Trump and the Koch brothers are climate change deniers, who in combination bring both a vast fortune and the power of the entire U.S. government to bear on their side of the issue.  PACE critics are simply sick people, with almost no political clout, who have only logic and experience available to make their case. If not quite a smear, Sharpe’s comparison of the two groups is a prime example of attempted guilt by association, which has no place in a scholarly discussion.

According to Sharpe’s abstract, however, there is nothing less at stake in the PACE controversy than “the future of science” itself. While he allows the possible value of “openness, interconnectedness and the patient voice the internet offers,” he is far more concerned by the threat of “the coordinated harassment of researchers by email, the issuing of repeated and co-ordinated (sic) freedom of information requests and the publication of comment on numerous blogs.”

Here again, Sharpe conflates obviously different phenomena for the apparent purpose of discrediting his critics.  I recognize that some British ME/CFS researchers have been harassed in the past, by email and otherwise, although I have seen no evidence that it was “coordinated” (sinister as the implication may be). Moreover, claims of harassment were evaluated in a U.K. judicial proceeding in which they were found to be “grossly exaggerated.”

In any case, the “repeated” use of freedom of information requests is clearly distinct from harassing emails.  Like it or not, the law in the U.K., and in most democratic countries, requires public access to government documents, including the data underlying publicly funded research studies.  Regarding the PACE trial, this principle was affirmed by decisions from both the Information Commissioner’s Office, which adjudicates freedom-of-information requests, and an appellate tribunal. These decisions forced the release of key PACE trial data, which led to the discovery that the results were overstated and ultimately unreliable. Sharpe may well feel aggrieved by this decision, but his position is not bolstered by associating the information-seekers with “harassment,” accusing them of coordination, or tarring them with the same brush as climate change deniers.

Perhaps Sharpe’s actual presentation explained these points more reasonably than appears from his abstract.  For that reason, I wrote to Sharpe and requested the text of his lecture. Recognizing his concern about email harassment, I assured him that my proposed commentary would be “measured and respectful,” in keeping with my firm commitment to “an academic discourse that maintains standards of civility.” Nonetheless, he did not reply.  Nor have I been able to locate anyone who attended the event, which, unlike previous iterations of the St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, was closed to the public.
 
I attempted to obtain further information about the seminar series – which is sponsored by the philosophy department at St Cross College – and especially the reason for barring the public from Sharpe’s presentation.  I wrote to both a departmental administrator and a professor who is identified on the St Cross website as specializing in “practical ethics,” but I got no answers.

Reading Sharpe’s abstract, it is impossible to miss the irony in a psychiatrist’s concern about the implications of patient protests “for the future of science.” Protesting patients, after all, greatly improved psychiatry when, in 1973, they finally obtained the removal of homosexuality as an officially designated “mental disorder” to be treated with psychotherapy. It took years of sometimes disruptive activism to get mainstream psychiatrists to recognize the tremendous harm they had caused to the gay community, and even then the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) continued to include “sexual orientation disturbance” until 1987. Many leading psychiatrists no doubt regarded the protests as harassment or even anti-science, but in fact they were simply pro-humanity.

Having specialized for many years in the study of professional ethics, I would very much like to know how Sharpe characterized the relationship between ethics and the criticism of his work.  As to the future of science, however, I am certain of one thing:  it will not thrive in secrecy.