All excellent questions. It all comes down to one standard: does the profession regulate itself strongly enough to make every practitioner aware (and somewhat fearful) that violating the profession’s standard will result in a penalty harsh enough to affect his or her life significantly?
In Giuliani’s case, for example, I think he should have refused to do certain things, say certain things in public or before courts, etc. that Trump asked him to do because he felt they would have certainly presented problems to him, personally, that were greater by far than any offsetting rewards Trump could offer him.
That is the purpose, in my view, that self-regulating professional standards serve–NOT the punishment in itself but the self-preservation that such standards put in the mind of everyone in the profession. To achieve that goal, I think we need clearer and swifter punishment for violators. It is my belief that many if not most professionals behave as if there were a large gray ethical area in which they may toy with the eithical standards of their profession without fear of penalty.
In my profession, every lawyer has to name another lawyer, usually the senior managing partner, who is notified of any allegations of misconduct against a lawyer in the firm. It’s not possible for there to be discipline investigations that only the target of the investigation knows about.
Any allegation of misconduct against a lawyer here is available on the disciplinary body’s website, and also all of the charging documents if it goes to the discipline committee. Hearings before the discipline committee are public hearings, announced in advance on the web-page, so that anyone can attend.
If a lawyer has faced discipline, there is a permanent note to that effect on the online directory of all the lawyers in the province. It never gets taken down, and provides a link to the discipline outcome.
Public transparency is a key part of the duty to protect the public.
The state dental board revoked this dentist’s license after he failed to complete drug addiction treatment, and you’re pissed because this action delayed your dental work?
Re the American Dental Association: similarly, the American Medical Association has no power to sanction or otherwise control MDs. At most, the A.M.A. promotes non-binding practice guidelines.
As far as punishment goes for professionals, if one oversight body doesn’t get you, another might. My Facebook news feed today included the story of an E.R. doc who was convicted of felony charges in a non-injury road rage incident. His lawyer managed to convince the state medical board not to suspend or revoke his medical license. However he was forced to leave his practice after CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) took away his billing privileges.
One other question I failed to ask - is there a code of ethics for your profession that everyone in it has agreed to meet? Or are you judging ethical by “yeah, that doesn’t sound so good.”
Clearer than what? Swifter than what? The devil is in the details.
Giuliani is an extreme case. My guess is that he was not afraid of sanctions because he thought he could buy or bully his way out of any punishment, and even if that was impossible, he was already at the end of his career. A 77-year-old man who already makes more money from not-lawyering (speaker and appearance fees, personal wealth and investments) doesn’t really need a license anymore. There’s very little that you can do to punish someone like him - it makes more sense to design a system around more typical ethical violations & non-ethical people.
He obviously wasn’t afraid of penalties, and probably thought that they couldn’t be applied to him in any way that mattered. Not such a good idea to advertise “Hey, if you’re old and rich you can do what you like.”
But as long as you’re dealing with professional penalties and not criminal penalties, that’s always true. I cannot think of any way to get around that because the worst a professional penalty can be is “you can’t do this profession anymore” and “you have to pay a fine” both of which are meaningless to the old and rich. (I may be suffering from a lack of imagination - but what else can they do?)
Are you saying that ethics violations should be criminalized so that violators face jail time? If so, that’s not something the professions can do - that’s a job for legislators. Should we have legislation against unethical conduct instead?
Well, of course, those two penalties are the harshest, and the most rarely applied. I was talking about applying them more freely. Rudy, for example, was all “What’s the worst thing you could possibly do to me?” and he probably wisely foresaw that he didn’t care that much if he got his law license revoked after a year or two or three of telling outrageous lies about his conduct. Make it a month after the first time you do even a little bit of it, and he might think differently. But yes “old” and “rich” are protection against most things, as John Huston says in CHINATOWN.
Perhaps a more sensible way to approach this topic is simply to ask what more severe penalties might look like in several professions. I’m sure there are those who propose more rigorous enforcement of ethical standards, and they usually get shot down: too much trouble, due process, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, what are you going to do about human nature, blablabla. and yet these people still persist in trying to ratchet up the ethical standards. So what is being proposed and shot down? My position is, obviously, to be open to these proposals, generally speaking, though I have no idea what is being proposed in most fields outside of my own. In yours (or in a field you’re knowledgeable about) what has been proposed to make the penalties harsher, the process speedier, the standards higher?
Nothing that I know of. I’m a registered engineer but I’m not a member of any professional societies. Obviously, Civil/structural engineers are having a bit of a freak out right now but I’m not aware of anyone trying to change the regulations for engineers in Colorado
The OP thinks that discipline should be quicker, like on a week’s time;
The OP thinks that punishments should be more severe;
The OP thinks that due process is just a “bla bla bla” that gets in the way of stricter discipline;
The OP thinks that about 20% of any given profession should be weeded out on a regular basis;
The OP is a member of a profession which he thinks is too lax in disciplining its members.
So, put that together: Roger_That, you’d be okay if you get a letter in the mail tomorrow from your regulatroy body that says a serious complaint has been made against you and your licence is pulled, effective July 7. That ticks all your boxes, right? Faster, within a week; serious, ending your ability to practise your profession; reduces due process bla bla bla, like your right to make full answer and defence; helps weed out the 20% who shouldn’t be practising; and indicates that your profession has got the message and is cracking down on its members.
You’d be okay with that, right? Losing your livelihood on 7 days’ notice, with no right to respond?
A lawyer was caught twice “commingling” client funds with his own. From the description of the complaint it seems like he was borrowing from his client’s accounts to pay his personal or office expenses. That would be theft in any other profession. The first time his license was suspended for 9 months, but restored on appeal. The second time it was suspended for three years but restored after 19 months. He actually used the fact that he was years behind on child support as a mitigating circumstance!
An addiction doctor (you guessed it) gets hooked on opioids. He gets caught selling prescriptions. Goes before some kind of review board, somehow gets off with some kind of probation. Has to take drug tests. You’d think if there was one guy who would have the knowledge and access to beat a drug test it would be him. Still working as an addiction specialist at an outpatient clinic!
A pharmacist got hooked on something. Got caught falsifying the controlled substances log. Got fired and reported to the state board but somehow didn’t even get suspended. Was working at a family owned pharmacy almost immediately. This was almost 30 years ago. I was the manager of the chain drugstore that he was the pharmacist-manager at.
So I’m not convinced the state boards (these were in three different states) are serious about dealing with bad apples in the professions they regulate.
I had it explained to me that in general, the various state Bars and Federal Bar tend to be pretty aggressive in terms of self-policing, because they are pretty sensitive to the idea that people already don’t trust lawyers.
I suspect that’s why the medical profession is almost the exact opposite- for the most part, you CAN kill someone, and not lose your license to practice medicine. I think they’re afraid that if they made a lot of noise about all the various fuck-up doctors and their grievous mistakes/malpractices, they’d erode a lot of the built up trust in their profession, rather than reassure the public.
I mean, look at this guy’s case.. Fellow doctors had to literally lobby the medical board to revoke his license after he killed and maimed 33 people. They just wanted originally to suspend it during the investigation.
I’ve had this thought before - that unions for jobs like teacher or police officer should place their profession first and individual members second. If someone is a shitty teacher or a violent cop, the attitude shouldn’t be “thin blue line” or “I better close ranks so this doesn’t set a bad precedent that leads to me being fired”. It should be, “this person, by doing a shitty job, is directly hurting all of us who AREN’T doing a shitty job”.
Of course, for teachers at least, we pay them like crap, so getting rid of that kind of job security would likely make a lot of people stop being teachers. So this sort of change would need to be coupled with better pay or benefits.
Make the job something worth fighting for; then enforce a higher standard.
Sometimes, but not often. Does anyone seriously think that the large number of successful malpractice suits, in the U.S., have resulted in American physicians being less negligent than those in other places, or better in any other way?
Do we think that having the world’s highest incarceration rate resulted in the U.S. being a low crime country?
Progressives might like it If Donald Trump lost the New York real estate license he almost surely has, but it wouldn’t improve how the Trump Organization treats suppliers, or anyone else.
Revocation of medical licenses, while relatively uncommon, is not “freakishly” rare. In Illinois in one recent year, 3 in 1000 lost their licenses. Many more were sanctioned in some way, including paying fines, being required to undergo additional training and/or being suspended until they complete treatment for addiction or other problems.
I don’t know how it works for other professions, but it is apparently common for state medical boards to have non-physician members. One state I’m licensed in has 3 attorneys on an 11-person board; another has 3 public (non-M.D.) members out of 12.
I can’t talk for all lawyers everywhere but I can tell you that for almost all lawyers I know, the answer to your question is an absolutely emphatic yes. In 30 years of practice I can think of about three lawyers who seemed to have an attitude that they could get away with anything. One of those is no longer in the profession because they found out they couldn’t get away with everything. The other two went from being relatively high profile to being sole practitioners out in the suburbs, because they are shunned and no respectable firm would work with them.
I strongly suspect that there is a massive amount of perception bias here. The very reason you have heard of the lawyers you have is because they are unethical and consequently newsworthy. Carrying on like a jerk attracts attention. For every such lawyer, there are probably 10,000 lawyers you haven’t heard of and you never will because they are ethical and just do their workaday work, never attracting attention.
And then much of the public perception of lawyers is driven by the entertainment industry and the same point applies. Believe me, 99.9% of working as a lawyer is not in the slightest bit entertaining. One of the ways to make law entertaining in fiction is to have your lawyer character be a rogue. That doesn’t mean TV shows represent reality.
I was unaware that “The Trump Show” was fictional. All by himself, he has engaged enough outrageously unethical shysters in the past three years alone to constitute a crisis in the legal profession–Giuliani, Powell, Cohen, the clowns representing him in the impeachment trial, and on and on–and to cast doubt on the ethical standards of that profession. Somehow, I doubt that he has managed to engage the only unethical attorneys in the universe.
