Stephen Glass, the disgraced former journalist who fabricated stories in the 1990s and was forced out of journalism, was denied admission to the California bar on Monday.
The state Supreme Court "sided with the State Bar, which opposed his fitness to be a lawyer in California by arguing that he does not meet the 'moral character' standards required of lawyers," Howard Mintz reported at the San Jose Mercury News.
I can hear the lawyer jokes already. Moral character standards for lawyers? Are you kidding? Before we go there, we might remember that some would ask the same questions regarding journalists. The real question is: Does Glass's punishment fit the crime?
Glass has been pursuing a law license for years, and he has received support from some legal scholars, although others have opposed admitting him to the bar, the Mercury News reports. His crime was fabricating material in a number of national stories, including, most notably, the New Republic. But he argues that after years of therapy, he has changed.
As a journalist, I'm not inclined to forgive his sins. He fundamentally undermined journalism, and journalists–all of us–by doing what he did. Some lawyers engage in practices that we might not think of as reflecting high moral standards, as Eugene Volokh, who teaches at the UCLA School of Law, explains on his blog The Volokh Conspiracy:
The rules of legal ethics famously don’t always match the rules of everyday ethics. Just to give one example, it’s a lawyer’s job to try to undermine the credibility of a witness who has implicated his client in a crime, even if the lawyer is certain that the witness is telling the truth. In most contexts outside the legal system, similar behavior would be seen as dishonest (because it is aimed at getting the jury to disbelieve someone who is telling the truth) and cruel (because it may involve the public embarrassment of an innocent witness). But our legal system, rightly or wrongly, tells lawyers that acting this way — within certain limits — is their legal duty.
Yet despite this, the legal system does care a good deal about lawyer ethics, as it defines them. And a propensity to outright fabrication is something state bars and state supreme courts are extremely worried about, even if it happens outside the context of legal practice. (The opinion pointed to the fact that, though Glass was in a different profession at the time, that profession also has firm standards related to honesty, and Glass egregiously violated those standards; it also noted that some of Glass’s fabrications occurred while he was going to law school.)
There is an element of unfairness here. How can Glass possibly prove that he has changed? He can't, and to hold him to that standard is effectively to guarantee that he will never practice law. On the other hand, the memory of his journalistic malfeasance is still fresh, although it occurred nearly 20 years ago.
Although we don't usually put it quite this way, journalism demands high moral character. Not all journalists meet that standard. But if we had a way to keep the untrustworthy ones out–by refusing to admit them to a journalists' bar–we might want to use it.
-Paul Raeburn
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