The Moral Responsibilities of Investment Bankers

This paper, presented as the annual law review lecture at the University of St. Thomas Law School, explores the moral obligations of investment bankers in light of the 2008 financial crisis. Topics such as disclosure to investors, the safety and soundness of investment banks, excessive risk taking, responsible use of derivative instruments, and banks’ responsibility to the community and to the financial system as a whole are discussed as issues of personal responsibility for investment bankers rather than only as subject matter for regulation directed at banking institutions. The particular perspective discussed in depth is grounded in Christian social teaching but the paper also offers insights on how the moral responsibility of investment bankers can and should be approached from a range of religious and secular philosophical perspectives. banking, ethics, finance, religion, value

Open Chambers?

Edward Lazarus has written the latest account of what goes on behind the marble walls of the Supreme Court. His book is not the first to selectively reveal confidential communications between the Justices and their law clerks. Another book, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong\u27s The Brethren2 achieved that distinction in 1979. Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court, however, adds a new twist. Whereas The Brethren was written by journalists who persuaded former law clerks to breach the confidences of the Justices, Lazarus was himself a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun. Closed Chambers is a well-written book. Lazarus\u27s prose is concise and colorful. His doctrinal discussions are alive with details from the lives of the persons who brought cases before the Court. Many of these were African-American capital defendants in the South ranging from the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s, nine men who almost certainly did not commit the crime of rape for which eight of them were sentenced to die in Alabama (pp. 77-85), to Warren McCleskey, who was executed in 1991 for murdering an Atlanta police officer while participating in a robbery, although he may not have fired the fatal shots (pp. 170-81). The book\u27s use of historical material provides perspective on how social norms and politics influence the Justices, as well as the Court\u27s history of confrontation with other branches of government, from Chief Justice Taney\u27s pernicious use of substantive due process to flout the Missouri Compromise in Dred Scott (pp. 246-47) to the Court\u27s dismantling of state death penalty statutes in the 1960s and 1970s (pp. 86-118). Far from being a digression, anecdote and history aptly frame Lazarus\u27s portrait of the Court in the late 1980s and early 1990s