Rationality Quotes July 2014

VAuroch

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Is that revelation grounds for a lawsuit, a criminal offense or merely grounds for disbarment?

None of the above, really, unless you have so few murder cases that someone could plausibly guess which one you were referring to. I work with about 100 different plaintiffs right now, and my firm usually accepts any client with a halfway decent case who isn't an obvious liar. Under those conditions, it'd be alarming if I told you that 100 out of 100 were telling the truth -- someone's bound to be at least partly faking their injury. I don't think it undermines the justice system to admit as much in the abstract.

If you indiscreetly named a specific client who you thought was guilty, though, that could get you a lawsuit, a criminal offense, and disbarment.

I will take you at your word that you could get away with making such disclosures. You are the lawyer and so the expert at judging what ethical violations people can technically get away with.

I have to thank you for allowing me to update my expectations regarding the ethical standards I can expect from an average legal representative. I now know I will need to filter more aggressively myself and not rely on the system to provide what I would otherwise have taken to be the most rudimentary standards of integrity I need from someone in that role. (That's a ... (read more)