Bob Schwartz

More ethical questions about the conduct of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: Clarence Thomas Secretly Participated in Koch Network Donor Events.

My first year of law school, I was privileged to have a course and book, Law, Language, and Ethics, taught by one of the course’s co-developers, William Bishin. It has stayed with me, not only as a lawyer but as a citizen.

Impossible to summarize a semester-long course and a 1,300-page book. Here is a concise point from the Preface:

“Law, Language, and Ethics is born of the belief that every legal problem…has its roots and perhaps its analog in traditional “philosophical” realms.”

Every day, whether discussing Trump-related criminal matters or Supreme Court Justice behavior, we naturally focus on whether laws, rules or guidelines have been formally and provably broken. In those reports and conversations, we miss so much and we miss the point.

If all or most of what we care about is whether laws or rules have been broken, we are in bad shape and will never get our government, nation or world better. We stay away from ethics because it is difficult and because thinking about ethics always comes back to thinking about ourselves. That isn’t easy or convenient.

So whatever the formal outcomes—a former president and his gang convicted, a Supreme Court Justice reprimanded, or not—we have to keep talking and talking about what is moral and what is ethical, not just about what is legal. In the long run, that is really what we have and what we need.

© 2023 by Bob Schwartz