At Ringside at the Reckoning, Paul Mirengoff writes about a possible conflict of interest at the Biden Justice Department. (See also here.) I have nothing to say about that, though I haven’t the slightest doubt that, had Donald Trump been reelected and thrown his Administration’s support behind the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Harvard, outrage would have boiled over if one of the lawyers who signed the government’s amicus brief had also been receiving a six figure salary from another pro-plaintiff amicus filer, even if that filer were merely a think tank rather than an entity with a very direct interest in the outcome of the case.
But conflicts of interest are, in these overlawyered times, evaluated by parsing ethics codes rather than applying moral intelligence. By the letter of the law, as Mr. Mirengoff notes, there may be no violation.
Be that as it may, the Ringside discussion includes this sentence: “Stanford has a similar policy and had filed an animus brief in the Harvard litigation before Karlan’s arrival at the DOJ.” (Emphasis added) I assume that “animus” is a typo for “amicus”, but what an excellent typo! Courts are overrun these days with briefs that are more animus than legal analysis, essentially op-eds with lawyers’ names attached. The legal system would be better off without them. If they can’t be prevented, at least we now have an adjective with which to label them.
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