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For-profit fantasy sports have taken a huge leap forward in the last year or so, with ads for daily/weekly fantasy competitions blanketing the airwaves. Earlier this month, a scandal erupted over employees of two of the sites using insider information to get an advantage over other players. Although largely not regulated as gambling (based on the skill/luck distinction), Nevada has stepped in to characterize these fantasy competitions as gambling and thereby require the websites to get a gambling license (or shut down). Other states seem likely to follow with additional regulation.
In the wake of this legal and media scrutiny, the industry has created a new Fantasy Sports Control Agency to begin a system of self-regulation. The press release lists four parts to the system. They are (quoting the release):
- Standards: Develop a system of standards for the fantasy sports industry founded on transparency, integrity and ethical behavior.
- Company Controls, Processes, and Leadership: Every FSTA member company will be expected to respond to the FSCA's standards by establishing a system of controls and processes to ensure compliance. In addition, every member company will be expected to appoint a senior leader reporting to top executives and overseeing compliance efforts.
- Auditing Policies and Procedures: Implementation of a sound, regular auditing process to measure and report on company compliance.
- Enforcement: Establishment of a system that provides incentives and public recognition for compliance with FSCA guidelines and penalties for failure to comply.
Heading up the FSCA will be Seth Harris, former Acting Secretary of Labor and Deputy Secretary of Labor in the Obama Administration. Prior to his service to DoL, Harris was a professor at New York Law School and a beloved member of the labor & employment law academy. On his new position, he said that "[t]he reason that the FSTA established an independent authority and asked me to lead this organization is to ensure that it's not a sham, that it's not a fake, that it's not just a publicity stunt." You can hear Seth being interviewed by his brother (KTRS host Paul Harris) about his new position here.
The creation of the FSCA and the hiring of Seth are smart moves by the nascent industry. Regulations will be coming at the state and possibly federal level, and the industry should get out in front of them and hope to blunt their force with a credible effort to self-police. For new industries, especially those along the "vice" spectrum, regulation can actually help prevent a market for lemons and can facilitate greater consumer participation. But prohibition can't! They key is finding the regulatory sweet spot that prevents attention-grabbing abuses but allows the industry to grow. The creation of this new agency demonstrates a recognition by the fantasy sports industry that there is likely "no freedom without regulation."
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The front page of today's WSJ featured a story about Mylan NV's failure to disclose a potential conflict of interest transaction with Rodney Piatt, its vice chairman, lead independent director, and compensation-committee chief. On the surface it looks like a classic conflict, and corporate law students and professors alike know that's a big no-no. As a director, Piatt has a fiduciary duty to look out for the best interests of Mylan--i.e., to pay the least possible amount. Of course, if he's on the other side of the transaction, human nature is to try to get the most money possible. Ergo, conflict.
The WSJ article suggests that failure to disclose the transaction violates a securities law that requires disclosure of related party transactions. The company says there was no related party transaction because "The day before Mylan announced plans to build the new headquarters, a company managed and partly owned by Mr. Piatt sold a 7-acre site for $1 to an entity owned by a business partner in Southpointe II, according to property records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The partner's firm sold the same land to Mylan for $2.9 million later the same day."
Yeah, it sounds fishy to me, too. But according to Mylan, "Mr. Piatt was not a party to either transaction" and "had no direct or indirect material interest in the transactions." Clearly they're arguing it doesn't count as a related party transaction because Piatt is not a party.
OK, maybe. Maybe. But Mylan might have another securities law problem: its code of ethics, which specifically covers directors (p. 3). Codes of ethics tend to be broader in scope than related party transactions. Nobody (but me) ever thinks about them, but Sarbanes-Oxley required that ethics codes be disclosed--along with any waivers the board of directors grants directors and senior officers (For you history buffs, this provision was the result of Andy Fastow's related-party transactions with Enron, all blessed by the board via ethics waivers).
Mylan's has a lengthy section on conflicts of interest. From the introduction:
We must avoid personal interests that conflict with the interests of Mylan, or that might influence or appear to influence our judgment or actions in performing our duties. The word "appear" is most important. Even where there is no actual conflict of interest, the appearance of such a conflict is damaging because it can undermine trust among personnel and jeopardize the company's standing with our customers, regulators, shareholders and others.
It's not clear what Piatt's relationship is to the business partner in Southpointe II to whom he sold the land for a dollar. But
Neither you nor any family member(s) may directly or indirectly participate in any business relationship with Mylan, other than your relationship as a director, officer, employee of Mylan, contractor or agent, unless such an arrangement has been approved by the OGC. Executive officers and directors must also obtain approval from the committee regarding such ar- rangements. Any such arrangement that has not been approved by the OGC or the Committee, as applicable, is a violation of the code and is prohibited.
Except as provided in this code, you are prohibited from acquiring any interest in a company that competes with Mylan or does business with Mylan, such as a vendor, supplier or customer, without the prior written consent of the OGC. Executive officers and members of the board must also obtain approval of the Committee before acquiring any such interest.
What's supposed to happen if there is the appearance of a conflict?
If a situation arises in which there is an actual, apparent or potential conflict of interest, you must disclose the matter to the OGC. If required, the OGC will escalate the matter to the Senior Executive Compliance Committee (committee).
If the committee finds that such conflict is not material and does not appear to be of a nature that it would influence the business decisions of those involved, the committee may grant a waiver in its sole discretion.
At Piatt's level, any such waiver should be disclosed as an 8-K, about which I know a little something. I didn't see one in December of 2013.
It's hard to find cases of where companies don't disclose waivers when they should have--you have to ferret out the nondisclosure first. It looks like the WSJ might have here.
Update: I forgot, Section 406 covers only the CEO, CFO, and CAO, so Piatt's waiver wouldn't have needed to be disclosed. He would still need to get one, arguably. And since the corporation has adopted a code of ethics that purports to apply to its board, if it is not following the required procedures that information would arguably be material.
The thing that gets me about codes of ethics is that they seem largely like empty corporatespeak. But they all address conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest are the one thing that shareholders really might care about--because they're a sign that corporate insiders are really just out to line their pockets at the company's expense. But nobody seems to take the codes seriously, and so conflicts often get ignored. Or that's my hunch--I don't know, because aside form the top three financial officers, waivers don't have to be disclosed!
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I co-teach a year-long Business Ethics class that culminates in the students writing and presenting a case study. (It occurs to me that I haven't blogged much about this class, and I will rectify that, but that's for another post.)
Today I want to talk about a case study that focused on textbook pricing-- undergraduate, because there is more information available. One student recounted a single Intro Bio textbook that cost $500. I remember thinking books were expensive back in my college days, but $500! How does textbook inflation compare with other metrics? According to the GAO, the price of textbooks increased 82% between 2002-2021, tuition and fees increased by 89%, and overall consumer prices grew by 28% (this stat and the others come via the excellent case study).
Where does all that money go? I've always wondered. According to this US News article, 21.6 %of the purchase price of a new book goes to the bookstore, 1% to shipping, and 77.4% to the publisher. And according to the same article, in 2008 (the last available data) 15.4% of the purchase price went to marketing, 11.7% to authors, 32.2% to paper, printing, and overhead.
We told the students to be neutral in the case study, so here's the publishers' position: students increasingly want products that accompany textbooks, including study guides and applications like online quizzes and homework for teachers. These things cost money to develop.
While the case study focused on college textbooks, of course the students talked about their experiences in law school. The consensus is that casebooks are way too expensive. There's a lot of frustration over the fact that rental prices and digital casebooks are not much less expensive than new ones. The students heartily condemned the widespread practice of changing a few pages in a casebook and then trotting out a new edition to avoid cannibalization from the secondary market.
I had pushed the case study author to address the professor's role in all this--not the casebook authors, but the professor selecting a casebook. Because, as the students are all too aware, this isn't a pure market, it's a mediated one. Students enrolled in a course are captive to their professor's textbook choices. Which brings me to my ethical question: what responsibility do I as a teacher have to my students in selecting a casebook? Should I pick the cheapest one? How much, if at all, should price matter to me? Some of my colleagues have even developed online casebooks, that are either free or available at a very low cost.
I can't go that far. I switch Corporations casebooks every year because 1) I'd get bored otherwise and 2) the students would have the notes from prior years and they would phone it in. And, frankly, I'm not excited about the prospect in compiling and editing a bunch of cases--there are plenty of people out there who have spent a lot of time thinking about how to structure a casebook, and they've done a better job than I could. The compromise I've currently struck is never to select a casebook in the first year of a new edition. That way at least the students have the choice of buying used. I'm not sure this is the right balance, but it's one I can feel okay about, at least for now. More deeply, it seems like as we move to digital publishing something has got to give.
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It has been a pleasure to guest-blog for the last two weeks here at the Glom. (Previous posts available here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.) This final post will introduce the book that Lynn Stout and I propose writing to give better direction to business people in search of ethical outcomes and to support the teaching of ethics in business schools.
Sometimes bad ethical behavior is simply the result of making obviously poor decisions. Consider the very human case of Jonathan Burrows, the former managing director at Blackrock Assets group. Burrows's two mansions outside London were worth over $6 million U.S., but he ducked paying a little over $22 U.S. in train fare each way to the City for five years. Perhaps Burrows had calculated that being fined would be less expensive than the inconvenience of complying with the train fare rules. Unluckily, the size of his $67,200 U.S total repayment caught the eye of Britain's Financial Conduct Authority, which banned Burrows from the country's financial industry for life. That's how we know about his story.
But how do small bad ethical choices snowball into large-scale frauds? How do we go from dishonesty about a $22 train ticket to a $22 trillion loss in the financial crisis? We know that, once they cross their thresholds for misconduct, individuals find it easier and easier to justify misconduct that adds up and can become more serious. And we know that there is a problem with the incentive structure within organizations that allows larger crises to happen. How do we reach the next generation of corporate leaders to help them make different decisions?
Business schools still largely fail to teach about ethics and legal duties. In fact, research finds "a negative relationship between the resources schools possess and the presence of a required ethics course." Moreover, psychological studies demonstrate that the teaching of economics without a strong ethical component contributes to a "culture of greed." Too often business-school cases, especially about entrepreneurs, venerate the individual who bends or breaks the rules for competitive advantage as long as the profit and loss numbers work out. And we fail to talk enough about the positive aspects of being ethical in the workplace. The situation is so bad that Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago asks point-blank if business schools incubate criminals.
New business-school accreditation guidelines adopted in April 2013 will put specific pressure on schools to describe how they address business ethics. Because business schools are accredited in staggered five-year cycles, every business school that is a member of the international accreditation agency will have to adopt ethics in its curriculum sometime over the next few years.
We hope that the work outlined in my blogposts, discussed at greater length in my articles, and laid out in our proposed book will be at the forefront of this trend to discuss business ethics and the law. We welcome those reading this blog to be a part of the development of this curriculum for our next generation of business leaders.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight) discussed the dangers of granting intracorporate conspiracy immunity to agents who commit coordinated wrongdoing within an organization. The last two blogposts (here and here) highlighted the harm that public and judicial frustration with this immunity inflicts on alternative doctrines.
In addition to exacerbating blind CEO turnover, substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects an executive's incentives under Director's and Officer's (D&O) liability insurance. This post builds on arguments that I have made about D&O insurance in articles here and here.
In traditional conspiracy prosecutions, the Model Penal Code (MPC) provides an affirmative defense for renunciation. The MPC's standard protects the actor, who "after conspiring to commit a crime, thwarted the success of the conspiracy, under circumstances manifesting a complete and voluntary renunciation of his criminal purpose." This means that the executive who renounces an intracorporate conspiracy faces no charges.
In contrast with conspiracy prosecutions, responsible corporate officer doctrine and its correlates fail to reward the executive who changes course to mitigate damages or to abandon further destructive behavior. Although the size of the damages may be smaller with lesser harm if the executive renounces an organization's course of conduct, the executive's personal career and reputation may still be destroyed by entry of a judgment. Modest whistle-blower protections are ineffectual.
Specifically, because of the way that indemnification and D&O insurance function, the entry of judgment has become an all-or-nothing standard: an employee's right to indemnification hinges on whether the employee is found guilty of a crime or not. To receive indemnification under Delaware law, for example, an individual must have been "successful on the merits or otherwise in defense of any action, suit or proceeding." Indemnification is repayment to the employee from the company; D&O insurance is a method that companies use to pass on the cost of indemnification and may contain different terms than indemnification itself.
Indemnification and D&O insurance are not a minor issues for executives. In fact, under many circumstances, employees have a right to indemnification from an organization even when the alleged conduct is criminal. Courts have acknowleged that "[i]ndemnification encourages corporate service by capable individuals by protecting their personal financial resources from depletion by the expenses they incur during an investigation or litigation that results by reason of that service." And when hiring for an executive board, "Quality directors will not serve without D&O coverage." Because of this pressure from executives, as many as ninety-nine percent of public U.S. companies carry D&O insurance.
So what does this standard mean for executives prosecuted under responsible corporate officer doctrine instead of for traditional conspiracy? Executives are incentivized either not to get caught, or to perpetrate a crime large enough that the monetary value of the wrongdoing outweighs the potential damage to the executive's career. Because an executive's right to indemnification hinges on whether he is found guilty of a crime or not, he has an enormous incentive to fight charges to the end instead of pleading to a lesser count. Thus, unless the executive has an affirmative defense to charges, like renunciation in traditional conspiracy law, there is no safety valve. Litigating responsible corporate officer doctrine cases creates a new volatile high-wire strategy. Moreover, as discussed in my last blogpost, responsible corporate officer doctrine imposes actual blind "respondeat superior" liability. Regardless of the merits, the executive may be penalized. So you can see the take-home message for executives: go ahead and help yourself to the largest possible slice pie on your way out the door.
I argue that in sending this message, and in many other ways, our current law on corporate crime is badly broken. My last blogpost for the Glom will introduce the book that Lynn Stout and I propose writing to give better direction to business people in search of ethical outcomes.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions were the best method to penalize coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Using alternative doctrines to impose liability on behavior that would otherwise be recognized as an intracorporate conspiracy results in flawed incentives and disproportionate awards.
The fundamental problem with substituting responsible corporate officer doctrine and control person liability for reforming the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is that these alternative doctrines represent exactly what Professor Martin objects to: actual imposition of blind "respondeat superior" liability. For example, under these doctrines, "in most federal courts, it is not necessary to show that the corporate official being charged had a culpable state of mind." Instead, the issue before the court is merely whether the officer had control and responsibility for the alleged actions. Accordingly, it is not a defense to control person liability that the officer did not "knowingly participate in or independently commit a violation of the Act."
But simply penalizing the officer who is in the wrong place at the wrong time does little to define and encourage best practices. Moreover, with these and other explosive hazards for corporate service, it should be no surprise that top executives are demanding and receiving ever-increasing compensation for often short-term positions. Since 2009, the year that the NSP case establishing "control person" liability was settled, the discrepancy in pay between top management and the average worker has been growing dramatically. In 2013, the CEO of J.C. Penny Co., for example, was exposed for making 1,795 times what the average U.S. department store employee made. From 2009 to 2013, as measured across Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500) of companies, "the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers" has risen to 204, an increase of twenty percent.
It is true that the financial crisis did reduce executive compensation packages before 2009, and that there has been a historical trend towards the growth of executives' salaries as a multiple of average workers' salaries. For example, "[es]timates by academics and trade-union groups put the number at 20-to-1 in the 1950s, rising to 42-to-1 in 1980 and 120-to-1 by 2000." But the jump in executives' salaries from 2009 has been extraordinary. The new emphasis on vicarious liability for individuals under the responsible corporate officer doctrine since that date must be considered part of executives' demands for such high compensation in exchange for their risky positions.
The average duration of a CEO's time in office has diminished as well. In 2000, the average tenure of a departing S&P 500 CEO in the U.S. was ten years. By 2010, it was down to eight years. In 2011, merely a year later, the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO was barely 4.6 years. In 2013, that former CEO of J.C. Penny Co. served for only eighteen months.
With an eighteen-month tenure, how much can the chief executive of a large company discover about the wrongdoing that his or her new company is committing? Furthermore, how much can that person design and institute good preventative measures to guide his or her subordinates to avoid that harm? A blindly revolving door for CEOs does not help those interested in effectively reducing the wrongdoing of agents within the corporation. Incentives without intracorporate conspiracy immunity would be different because they would reward the agent who abandons a conspiracy. (More about this argument here, here, here, and here.)
My next blogpost will examine how substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects incentives under Director's and Officer's (D&O) liability insurance.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, and six) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents.
My Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap article argues that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is not properly based in agency law, and that it should most certainly not be applied throughout tort law and criminal law. As a result of the immunity granted by the doctrine, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article argues that public and judicial frustration with the lack of accountability for corporate conspiracy has now warped the doctrines around it.
Courts have used a wide variety of doctrines to hold agents of enterprises responsible for their actions that should have prosecuted as intracorporate conspiracy. Some of these doctrines include:
• piercing the corporate veil,
• responsible corporate officer doctrine, and related control person liability,
• denying the retroactive imposition of the corporate veil, and
• reverse piercing of the corporate veil.
But the new applications of these alternative doctrines are producing distortions that make the doctrines less stable, less predictable, and less able to signal proper incentives to individuals within organizations.
An example of how piercing the corporate veil has been used to defeat intracorporate conspiracy immunity can be seen in the Morelia case. A previous blogpost discussed how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has defanged RICO prosecutions of agents and business entities. In Morelia, which was a civil RICO case, the federal district court, obviously outraged by defendants' behavior in the case, explicitly permitted plaintiffs to pierce the corporate veil to avoid application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. In a creative twist invented from whole cloth to link the two doctrines, the Morelia court overruled its magistrate judge's recommendation to announce:
"Since the court has determined that plaintiffs have properly alleged that the corporate veil should be pierced, the individual defendants may be liable for corporate actions and any distinction created by the intra-corporate doctrine does not exist."
Regarding its test for piercing the corporate veil, the Morelia court further overruled its magistrate's recommendation by focusing on plaintiffs' arguments regarding undercapitalization, and its decision included only a single footnote about the disregard of corporate formalities.
The Morelia court is not alone in its frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine and in its attempt to link analysis under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine with the stronger equitable tenets of piercing the corporate veil. More subtly, courts across the country have started to entangle the two doctrines' requirements as intracorporate conspiracy immunity has become stronger and courts have increasingly had to rely on piercing the corporate veil as an ill-fitting alternative to permit conspiracy claims to proceed. Even large public companies should take note. No public company has ever been pierced, but a bankruptcy court recently reverse-pierced corporate veils of the Roman Catholic Church, which is far from a single-person "sham" corporation. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article discusses additional examples and repercussions for incentives under each of these alternative doctrines.
My next blogpost will examine how frustration with intracorporate conspiracy immunity has led to volatility in responsible corporate officer doctrine and related control person liability. Ironically, executive immunity from conspiracy charges fuels counterproductive CEO turnover.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, and five) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The 2012 prosecution of Monsignor Lynn for twelve years of transferring predator priests from parish to parish at the command and for the benefit of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was defeated by the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. Moreover, this was not the first time that the Roman Catholic Church had used the doctrine to help its bureaucrats escape liability for suppressing sex abuse cases.
In 1997, employees of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut were alleged—very much like Lynn—to have covered up the sexual misconduct of a priest, enabling him to continue to abuse children entrusted to the Church's care by virtue of his office. When sued for civil conspiracy by the victims, the employees' defense was that they were acting in the best interest of the corporation.
The Connecticut court found that the test for whether an agent is acting within the scope of his duties "is not the wrongful nature of the conspirators' action but whether the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators' official duties." If the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators' official duties, the effect of applying the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is to find that there was no conspiracy. Because covering up the priest's sex abuse was in the best interest of the corporate organization, the court found that the employees were all acting on behalf of the corporation. The court never reached the issue of whether the employees' actions rose to the level of a civil conspiracy. Under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, it was a tautology that no conspiracy could be possible.
This case is interesting not only because it documents the way that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine protects enterprises from inquiry into conspiracies, but also because of the subsequent history of its allegations. The full extent of the Bridgeport Diocese's wrongdoings—if current public knowledge is indeed complete—only came to light in December 2009, twelve years after the 1997 case. It took twelve years, the combined resources of four major newspapers, an act displaying public condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church by members of the state legislature, and finally a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to release the documents that could have become the basis of the intracorporate conspiracy claim in 1997. There is still no conspiracy suit or any criminal charge against the Diocese. Additional details about the case are available in my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap. The article will be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review, and it is available in draft form here.
Astonishingly, none of the extensive news coverage about the sexual abuse cases in Bridgeport over those additional twelve years has connected these facts to the original 1997 case defeated by application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. If the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine had not provided immunity, the case might have revealed the Diocese's pattern of wrongdoing long beforehand and in a much more efficient way.
My next blogpost reveals additional dangers from the spread of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine: frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has started to distort other areas of law.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, and four) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within a business organization. The same legal analysis applies to religious organizations.
We should have been able to charge Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that directed his actions to hide the sexual abuse by priests with criminal conspiracy. Instead, Pennsylvania charged Lynn with two things: child endangerment and conspiracy with the priests.
As international news outlets later reported, Lynn could not be guilty of child endangerment because the state's statute could not apply to an administrative church official who did not directly supervise children.
Lynn could not be guilty of conspiracy with the priests because he did not share their "particular criminal intent." As the jury understood, Lynn was not trying to help a predator priest get from parish to parish so that "he can continue to enjoy what he likes to do." Lynn was trying to protect the reputation of his employer, the Archdiocese—if the priests benefitted, that was a side issue.
So why didn't the prosecution charge Lynn and the Archdiocese with conspiracy? It was the Archdiocese that directly coordinated and profited from Lynn's actions. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, as discussed before, would bar that prosecution. In Pennsylvania, it is "well-settled that a corporation cannot conspire with its subsidiary, its agents, or its employees."
Finally, considering other options, Lynn could not have been charged with possible crimes such as obstruction of justice. Lynn was too good: Lynn and the Archdiocese were so successful at covering up the sexual abuse and silencing victims, there was no ongoing investigation to obstruct. "Aiding and abetting" the Archdiocese's cover-up of the sex abuse would have been difficult to pursue (see more here) and is not allowed under RICO in the Third Circuit.
My next blogpost will demonstrate that the Monsignor Lynn case was also part of a pattern by the Roman Catholic Church in America to use the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine to hide the coordinated wrongdoing of its agents to cover-up sexual abuse by priests. Fifteen years before prosecutors attempted to try Monsignor Lynn, the silenced Connecticut sex-abuse case showed the Church how effective this defense could be.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, and three) introduced the topic of how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine prevents the prosecution of coordinated wrongdoing by individuals within organizations. This post illustrates the doctrine's effect in the context of a specific organization—here a religious one: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the systematic transfer of predator priests. This post is based on my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap to be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review. The article is available in draft form here.
For twelve years, from 1992 to 2004, as Secretary for Clergy, Monsignor William Lynn's job within the Philadelphia Archdiocese was to supervise priests, including the investigation of sex-abuse claims. In 1994, Monsignor Lynn compiled a list of thirty-five "predator" priests within the archdiocese. He compiled the list from secret church files containing hundreds of child sex-abuse complaints. On the stand, Lynn testified that he hoped that the list would help his superiors to address the growing sex-abuse crisis within the Archdiocese. But for twelve years Lynn merely re-assigned suspected priests, and he hid the abuse within the church. His superiors never acted on the list that Lynn gave them—in fact, they ordered all copies of the list destroyed—and Lynn never contacted outside authorities. As late as 2012, one of the "predator" priests on Lynn's list was still serving in a parish.
All parties agree that Lynn's actions in transferring priests who molested children allowed those priests to continue to abuse children, sheltered the priests from potential prosecution, and directly protected the Philadelphia Archdiocese's reputation.
In fact, Lynn's actions had been ordered by the archbishop on behalf of the Archdiocese. Lynn reported what he was doing to his superiors, who rewarded Lynn with twelve years of employment and a prominent position within the Archdiocese for doing his job as they saw it. Moreover, the archbishop himself inadvertently revealed the existence of the number thirty-five "predator" priests to the media, and he was the one who ordered all copies of the list to be shredded to keep it from being discovered in legal proceedings.
The instinct here is that this behavior—the transferring of predator priests to cover-up the sexual abuse of children—should have been illegal for Monsignor Lynn to pursue. But the Commonwealth could not prosecute Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese for conspiracy. Furthermore, immunity for Lynn's behavior is now the rule in most state and federal jurisdictions around the country. As described in an earlier blogpost, the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy.
My next blogpost will further investigate why this behavior was not illegal under our current system, and how we should have tried Monsignor Lynn.
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My first and second blogposts introduced why conspiracy prosecutions are particularly important for reaching the coordinated actions of individuals when the elements of wrong-doing may be delegated among members of the group.
So where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy??? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 ("RICO", 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1961 et seq.), no longer applies to most business organizations and their employees. In fact, business organizations working together with outside agents can form new protected "enterprises."
What's going on here? In this area and many other parts of the law, we are witnessing the power of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. This doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. According to the most recent American Law Reports survey, the doctrine "applies to corporations generally, including religious corporations and municipal corporations and other governmental bodies. The doctrine applies to all levels of corporate employees, including a corporation's officers and directors and owners who are individuals." Moreover, it now extends from antitrust throughout tort and criminal law.
What is the practical effect of this doctrine? The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents. Obedience to a principal (up to a point) should be rewarded in agency law. But the law should not immunize an agent who acts in the best interest of her employer to commit wrongdoing. Not only does the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunize such wrongdoing, but the more closely that an employer orders and supervises the employee's illegal acts, the more the employer is protected from prosecution as well.
My next blogpost illustrates how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine operates to defeat prosecutions for coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Let's examine the case of Monsignor Lynn.
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In my previous blogpost, I granted the merit of defense counsel's argument that the actions of discrete individual defendants—when the law is not permitted to consider the coordination of those actions—may not satisfy the elements of a prosecutable crime.
But what is the coordination of individuals for a wrongful common purpose? That's a conspiracy. And, for exactly the reasons that defense counsel articulates, these types of crimes cannot be reached by other forms of prosecution. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that conspiracy is its own animal. "[C]ollective criminal agreement—partnership in crime—presents a greater potential threat to the public than individual delicts." When we consider the degree of coordination necessary to create the financial crisis, we are not talking about a single-defendant mugging in a back alley—we are talking about at least the multi-defendant sophistication of a bank robbery.
Conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis have some other important features. First, the statute of limitations would run from the last action of a member of the group, not the first action as would be typical of other prosecutions. This means that many crimes from the financial crisis could still be prosecuted (answering Judge Rakoff's concern). Second, until whistle-blower protections are improved to the point that employees with conscientious objections to processes can be heard, traditional conspiracy law provides an affirmative defense to individuals who renounce the group conspiracy. By contrast, the lesson Wall Street seems to have learned from the J.P. Morgan case is not to allow employees to put objections into writing. Third, counter to objections that conspiracy prosecutions may be too similar to vicarious liability, prosecutors would have to prove that each member of the conspiracy did share the same common intent to commit wrongdoing. The employee shaking his head "no" while saying yes would not be a willing participant, but many other bankers were freely motivated by profit at the expense of client interest to cooperate with a bank's program.
My next blogpost will ask: where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy?
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It is a pleasure to be guest-blogging here at The Glom for the next two weeks. My name is Josephine Nelson, and I am an advisor for the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford's business school. Coming from a business school, I focus on practical applications at the intersection of corporate law and criminal law. I am interested in how legal rules affect ethical decisions within business organizations. Many thanks to Dave Zaring, Gordon Smith, and the other members of The Glom for allowing me to share some work that I have been doing. For easy reading, my posts will deliberately be short and cumulative.
In this blogpost, I raise the question of what is broken in our system of rules and enforcement that allows employees within business organizations to escape prosecution for ethical misconduct.
Public frustration with the ability of white-collar criminals to escape prosecution has been boiling over. Judge Rakoff of the S.D.N.Y. penned an unusual public op-ed in which he objected that "not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis." Professor Garett's new book documents that, between 2001 and 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to charge any individuals at all for crimes in sixty-five percent of the 255 cases it prosecuted.
Meanwhile, the typical debate over why white-collar criminals are treated so differently than other criminal suspects misses an important dimension to this problem. Yes, the law should provide more support for whistle-blowers. Yes, we should put more resources towards regulation. But also, white-collar defense counsel makes an excellent point that there were no convictions of bankers in the financial crisis for good reason: Prosecutors have been under public pressure to bring cases against executives, but those executives must have individually committed crimes that rise to the level of a triable case.
And why don't the actions of executives at Bank of America, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan meet the definition of triable crimes? Let's look at Alayne Fleischmann's experience at J.P. Morgan. Fleischmann is the so-called "$9 Billion Witness," the woman whose testimony was so incriminating that J.P. Morgan paid one of the largest fines in U.S. history to keep her from talking. Fleischmann, a former quality-control officer, describes a process of intimidation to approve poor-quality loans within the bank that included an "edict against e-mails, the sabotaging of the diligence process,… bullying, [and] written warnings that were ignored." At one point, the pressure from superiors became so ridiculous that a diligence officer caved to a sales executive to approve a batch of loans while shaking his head "no" even while saying yes.
None of those actions in the workplace sounds good, but are they triable crimes??? The selling of mislabeled securities is a crime, but notice how many steps a single person would have to take to reach that standard. Could a prosecutor prove that a single manager had mislabeled those securities, bundled them together, and resold them? Management at the bank delegated onto other people elements of what would have to be proven for a crime to have taken place. So, although cumulatively a crime took place, it may be true that no single executive at the bank committed a triable crime.
How should the incentives have been different? My next blogpost will suggest the return of a traditional solution to penalizing coordinated crimes: conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis.
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In this post, which follows our earlier discussion of legal strategy, we'll offer examples of companies situated within each of the five pathways. As Robert and I mentioned in our article, most companies follow the compliance pathway. Such companies insource legal compliance through their in-house legal department, or they may choose to partner with an external compliance verification service. A firm such as ISN, for example, has built a business handling compliance issues for corporations and their subcontractors. According to the Society of Compliance and Corporate Ethics, compliance is a thriving industry due to the increased legal penalties and regulations that companies face in today's heightened legal environment.
The avoidance pathway is less frequent, given the high stakes and liability attached to this type of strategy. General Motors may have engaged in avoidance if it misled regulators about its faulty ignition switches. Avoidance issues tend to be costly to deal with, given the loss of trust and enhanced penalties that arise from this behavior.
The more interesting and rare pathways involve prevention, value, and transformation. An interesting and controversial prevention legal strategy involves trademark policing, which, in its most egregious form, devolves into the unethical and legally dubious practice of trademark bullying. For example, Chik-fil-A employs an aggressive strategy that targets large and small companies alike and uses the threat of trademark litigation to prevent anyone from encroaching upon its trademarked brands and brand equity. Setting aside the overreaching and legally dubious aspects of this approach, some companies legitimately use a preventive legal strategy that involves cease and desist letters, litigation, and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office administrative oppositions to protect the value of their brands and advertising. The Chik-fil-A case serves as a useful reminder, however, that aggressive legal strategies may push the boundaries of ethical behavior, sound legal argument, and public opinion.
Two recent examples illustrate how employing a legal strategy in the value pathway can generate positive and tangible financial returns. The first instance involves hedge funds investing in a corporate acquisition target and then filing suit in Delaware to challenge the valuation and seek an appraisal from the court. This legal strategy is referred to as appraisal arbitrage. Many of these cases either settle or result in substantially higher prices for the party seeking the appraisal.
Another value strategy that has been in the headlines recently involves tax inversions. Burger King's recent decision to acquire Canada's Tim Horton's will yield business synergies, but it also exploits a legal maneuver allowed under current tax law permitting a company acquiring a foreign entity to reincorporate in the foreign jurisdiction. By reincorporating in Canada, Burger King will effectively lower its tax rate from 35% to 15%.
The last and rarest of legal strategies is transformation. This occurs when the top executives in a corporation integrate law as a core aspect of the firm's business model to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Few companies are able to achieve this strategic pathway, and it's certainly not for everyone. One company that notoriously used law to achieve abnormally large market share and margins in the ticket processing industry was Ticketmaster. The ticket service provider used venue ticket licensing contracts that included several key provisions such as long term renewable exclusivity terms (up to 5 years), and more infamously, fee sharing provisions. Ticketmaster's business model was, essentially, to take the bad rap for charging exorbitant convenience fees and sharing those fees with the venue, thus contractually locking them into a highly profitable and exclusive business system. It didn't hurt that Ticketmaster's pioneering CEO Fred Rosen was a Wall Street attorney turned impresario.
Another company that is showing signs of attempting to pursue a transformative legal strategy is Tesla Motors. Tesla's recent announcement to offer open licensing terms for its battery and charging station patents illustrates a pioneering mentality that seeks to build a business ecosystem with other auto manufacturers. By doing so, Tesla has made a major legal bet that giving up patent exclusivity rights in the short term will yield long-term competitive advantage by helping to diffuse electric battery and recharging technology. The other legal strategy Tesla has pursued relates to its pioneering distribution model of direct sales to the consumer, bypassing the traditional dealership model established for conventional automobiles. To achieve this direct-to-customer model, Tesla has engaged state regulators to achieve exemptions from state dealership franchise laws. Tesla is clearly strategizing and innovating along many fronts that involve business, technology and law. It remains to be seen, however, whether these legal strategies will offer Tesla a long-term sustainable competitive advantage.
In our next and last post, we'll discuss our experience teaching the five pathways of legal strategy to business students and how it has been a valuable resource in the classroom.
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This week's Economist has a column praising my UCLAW colleague Stephen Bainbridge's and University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson's creative proposal, published in the Stanford Law Review, to replace individual directors with professional-services firms acting as Board Service Providers (BSPs). (That article can be accessed here.) The column nicely summarizes the possible impact of such a change:
"Messrs Bainbridge and Henderson argue that this would require only a simple legal change but could revolutionise the stick-in-the-mud world of boards. It would replace today's nod-and-a-wink arrangements with a market in which rival BSPs compete. It would create a new category of professional director. And it would allow BSPs to exploit economies of scale to recruit the best board members, introduce more rigorous training programmes and develop the best proprietary knowledge. Now, even the most diligent board member can only draw on his or her experience. BSPs would be able to draw on the expertise of hundreds. This would increase the chances that corporate incompetence will be corrected, corporate malfeasance found out and corporate self-dealing, in the form of inflated pay, countermanded."
The BSP idea is very creative. (Frankly, I am always puzzled by the extent to which academics have trouble appreciating creativity. Perhaps—and I'm speculating here—traits such as creativity are weakly correlated with succeeding in the academic tournament—getting high LSAT scores, writing good law school exams, getting judicial clerkships, and placing law review articles?) I also agree that introducing market competition by enabling firms to compete on performance will likely benefit consumers and shareholders, as well as increase the leverage of the board vis-à-vis executive officers.
That said, I worry about uncontrolled expenditures as BSPs find yet another reason to bill the corporation another $250,000 for yet another "critical project." My prior experience as general counsel of a corporation (plus my six years of practicing law in a law firm) make me skeptical of the incentives of partners within firms ("Bill, bill, bill!"). I worry about the ratio of the value of services to cost. While we may see a decrease in executive compensation as a result of increased board leverage, are we going to see an increase in the effective compensation (i.e., including billings) of the board? My guess is yes.
I also worry about the audit/gatekeeping function of the Board. After all, we have plenty of experience with auditors being firms, rather than individuals. And the record there doesn't look so hot. Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen? And remember Ted Eisenberg's and Jonathan Macey's empirical study suggesting that Andersen was not an outlier but typical? While gatekeeping theory provides that market gatekeepers, such as investment banks and accounting firms, are incentivized to work hard to prevent malfeasance out of fear that their longstanding reputations will be damaged, the reality is that the reputational informational markets are noisy and manipulable. Moreover, the incentives of the firm's agent – the functional gatekeeper – may diverge from the incentives of the firm. In other words, large firms may suffer from principal-agent problems, as has often been alleged with David Duncan, the lead audit partner responsible for the Enron account at Andersen. (In prior work, I wrote about the incentives of firms vs. individuals for the audit/gatekeeping function.)
But I suppose Henderson and Bainbridge would respond that still, those reputation markets would work better with firms competing with one another than the status quo—little to no competition with respect to individual directors (for various reasons).
Perhaps there's room for compromise. If you've been following the accounting profession, you know that the PCAOB (the body that regulates the accounting of public companies) in an effort to improve the transparency of audits has proposed to require the disclosure of the name of the engagement partner for the most recent period's audit. Also, it has been suggested that the engagement partner individually sign the audit report. It should not be surprising that accounting firms uniformly dislike these suggestions. This indicates that they are probably good ideas. Perhaps, then, as a means of dealing with the principal-agent problem within BSPs themselves and to ensure that the incentives of the firm's agents (the persons who actually sit in board meetings) are more properly aligned, similar measures should be taken.
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Citre Shine Miracle Anti-Frizz Serum
We're sorry, this product is no longer available.
For lustrous, healthy shine that goes straight to your head, use Citre Shine Shine Miracle Anit-Frizz Serum.
Nancy C.
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Jul 2, 2014
Great Hair Product
This is really a Good Hair Product !!!
Love this product, being using it for many years, until now, because I can,t find any in any stores??? I have missed this product very much, I have no clue why I can,t find it anymore in my stores that I had bought from before, I live in Newark Delaware, and just can,t find it ?? So I thought what if I go on line and see if I can find it...Bingo...I did...
You will love this for your hair if you have never tried it before.
Nancy Culver,
1 out of 1 shoppers thought this review was helpful.
Connie W.
Jun 1, 2014
This Serum Keeps My Hair Healthy, Shiny And Manageable.
I have been using this product for years and it seems to get more difficult to fine. I have tried several brands and none work as good as Citre. It is also much less expensive than many rodents I have tried. If you have any frizz in your curly hair, this product is a no brainer. Well worth the $6.95!
2 out of 2 shoppers thought this review was helpful.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Recyclable Materials Do Recycle These Please the following CLEAN and EMPTY items in the recycle box: Paper Bulk mailings books phone books newspapers inserts magazines catalogues office paper file folders paper bags Boxes food/drink/soup/shipping boxes gable-tops cartons paper towel rolls, etc. Cardboard/Cartons (flatten all boxes) Plastic bottles and containers #1-7 Glass jars and bottles (lids attached) Metal metal pots and pans foil pie tins license plates aluminum tin steel aerosol cans Don't Recycle These Garbage Styrofoam electronics ceramics dishes or glassware food waste plastic bags hazardous waste containers light bulbs, window glass or mirrors electrical cords, hoses or ropes syringes/sharps yard waste What's the Best Way to Fill my Recycle Box? The best way is to place your papers, flattened cardboard, and magazines on the bottom of the box and place the containers on top of the paper.If you have flattened cardboard that is too big to be placed in the box, it is fine to place it under the box so it doesn't blow away. Flattened cardboard should be cut in lengths no longer that 4' and if there is more than ½ cubic yard, should be bundled and tied. If you have containers that can be flattened (milk jugs, juice containers), doing so will save room in the trucks! Please remember, households are required to recycle. Need Help? Call 311 (outside the city call 585-428-5990) for more information. SEE ALSO Green Initiatives | Refuse and Recycling


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USED Caterpillar 930 Loader
Get A Tractor Michigan Sales Marquette – $19,900. This Cat loader can really push the snow, the extended bucket and serious power makes plowing fun! This would also be a great machine to have out at camp or for summer projects. Get in touch with Michigan Sales for more information.
If you have questions, fill out this form below and we will call you right back!
Item prices and availability NOT guaranteed.


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eptember 15, 1997
Free car seat safety presentation
NW News Staff
Woodinville Toddler Group, a parent-child program affiliated with Lake Washington Technical College, is offering a car seat safety presentation as a community service Sept. 22 from 7-9 p.m. This parents' only educational program will provide information on proper use of car seats and booster seats for infants, toddlers and young children. A speaker from the Washington State Safety Restraint Coalition will cover the many different types of car seats, how to properly buckle your child in, car seat installation and answer any questions.
This car seat safety presentation will be presented at Northshore United Church of Christ, 18900 168th Avenue N.E. in Woodinville. For more information please call Woodinville Toddler Group at 521-8244.


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New Site Police Chief John McKelvey said that the 2 teens, who are students at Horseshoe Bend High School, are to appear in Juvenile Court on Sept. 16 to face first-degree felony animal cruelty charges.
What they are accused of doing, meanwhile, has made the boys the subject of ridicule everywhere from the school hallways to the pages of Facebook.
"They've done it and I'm not going to say that they were right, I won't support them," McKelvey said. "But the people that's jumping on the story and making up stuff that didn't happen, to me it's no different than what happened to the kitten.
"For the parents, it's the same way, they're having to deal with it. I think they (the boys) will be punished the way they need to be punished and I wish people who didn't know the way it happened would leave it alone."
What is believed to have happened is this:
The two boys were in a dugout on the school grounds taking part in an after-school activity on Monday, Aug. 23. At the time, they were out of the site of the supervising adults.
Somehow the boys came upon a kitten that is believed to be a stray. They then proceeded to torture the cat, spraying spray paint in the cat's eyes in an attempt to blind it. They also threw the cat in the air, McKelvey told the Press-Register.
At some point -- and there are conflicting reports about exactly what happened -- one of the kitten's legs was broken, either by it falling when it was being thrown in the air or by it being kicked.
"I picked up the cat and took it to a veterinary clinic," McKelvey said. "They performed surgery, the cat has recovered and is now placed in a home. A nice family that had been looking for a kitten and had been to some of the shelters adopted the kitten and is now taking care of it. It's doing real well."
McKelvey said the members of the Police Department named the female kitten Jane Doe, but that he's not sure if the adoptive family kept that name. "We thought it would fit," he said of the name, adding that he asked around extensively to see if the cat had any owner.
As part of the boys' punishment, they are likely to be held responsible for the cost of the cat's care at Twin Creeks Veterinary Services in Ashland. McKelvey said he believes the cost of the surgery and after-care is about $600.
Horseshoe Bend Principal Casey Davis issued a statement saying that the incident involved "poor judgment on the part of some of our students" and that the school has handled the incident according to its code of conduct.
"It has been handled according to Tallapoosa County's Code of Conduct, which I believe is the appropriate action for us to take," Davis said in the statement. "Beyond that we have no reason to comment further because our response to the issue has been handled as it should have been and that has been within our school system guidelines."
New Site is in Tallapoosa County in east central Alabama, northeast of Alexander City.
While McKelvey said he will prosecute the case to the fullest extent possible within the law and that he just hopes that people realize that while the boys did something terribly wrong, that "these kids are living people, that they're living organisms themselves."
"I've seen people convicted of murder be received back into the community better than these kids have been," McKelvey said.


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In the playoff series against the Phoenix Suns, it was clear Duncan needed help patrolling the paint. The Suns took advantage and Spurs fans saw Steve Nash and even Goran Dragic get to the rim with ease. Considering there was no weak-side help defense.
Splitter would be a nice fit. He is young, at 25 years old, and his experience from international competition should help his transition into the NBA less difficult. Not to mention he was named the 2009-2010 ACB MVP which speak volumes about his ability to play the game.
But there is on huge question: will he opt to stay overseas and look for a pay-day or will he realize his dream and play in the NBA?
With the Spurs over the salary-cap, the team will be salary-conscious and will probably offer Splitter the mid-level exemption which is about 5.85 million. But will that be enough to lure him to play in San Antonio? Getting Splitter doesn't necessarily mean the Spurs will be back in the title hunt, nor will it solve all the Spurs' issues but it does address an immediate concern.
Splitter can provide the Spurs more size in the paint, another scoring option in the post, and a defensive boost to their aging and undersized front-court. If that happens, the Spurs will have a front-court rotation of Duncan, Splitter, McDyess and Blair which looks very good on paper.
However, Duncan not only needs a "side kick" in the paint, he will also need more rest to stay efficient and effective. Blair has proven he can provide meaningful minutes while Duncan rests but he is too undersized against most bigs in the league which creates match-up problems. McDyess can still defend and hit the occasional jumpers but at 35 years old, he will need to reserve his energy for the post-season play.
Aside from Splitter, the Spurs need yet another big-man who can fill in some minutes for the Spurs. So what about Ian Mahinmi?
It may seem that the Spurs have waited long enough for Mahinmi to show he was worth being drafted but the reality is, he has only played a total of 32 games in his NBA career averaging 3.8 points and 1.8 rebounds while shooting 61.2% from the field and 71.4% from the free throw line in just 5.9 minutes of playing time.
If Splitter plays out well, assuming he comes to play for the Spurs next season, the Spurs will have the luxury of giving the Duncan the night off during the second sets of back-to-backs. This will make the Spurs a better team in the long run.
What do you guys think? Is Splitter enough to solve the Spurs' front-court issues? Does Mahinmi deserve a legitimate chance to prove he can play with the Spurs or is there another free-agent big man worth considering in the coming off-season? Share us your thoughts.


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In combat and hunting when you pull the trigger you expect the end.
I walked into the hotel lobby and observed the Mobius crew meandering about, some working on laptops, but generally looking very bored as usual. I thought I'd fire them up a bit, considering I do that in some way nearly every day. You know you guys are a lot harder to kill than the VC were in Vietnam, we are going to have to come up with a more powerful gun. I'm sure they were impressed with my complement, and I got the big "Yea right" look, I had hoped for. By now they were use to my gallows humor usually at their expense, but after two years of getting to know them, I found we have a lot in common. By the way all of these guys are Iraqi and Afghan so my statement was clearly understood. They knew exactly what I was talking about as many had seen years of combat. Just for the record these are the guys that fight alongside our troops as brothers in arms. Now they train the US Army at Ft Polk, and are instrumental in saving many a soldiers lives.
Of course all the hero stuff does not alleviate these guys from Uncle John ridicule, soon they were showing me actual combat footage of gun fights in the streets, saved on the laptops, that would make the OK Coral look like a walk in the park.
It is all about knock down power and the 5.56 NATO cartridge .223 Remington, just doesn't have it. The edge over the AK-47 with its 7.62X39 cartridge is not in knockdown power or reliability, it is in accuracy. The fact remains that the Iraqi Security Forces, if given a choice would rather pack an AK than an M-16. Simple lesson learned, they want to stop the bad guys in their tracks.
The armed forces are in the processes of developing a more powerful combat cartridge most likely the already established and tested 6.8 Remington SPC, a 30 Remington case necked down to .277 cal. like the the 270 Winchester but not quite as powerful. This fits into the Stoner action of the M-16 or M-4 and suddenly you have a more powerful combat rifle.
The reason is you now have a heavier bullet, at about the same speed, with a greater diameter. This simply equates to more knock down power if you will. There are many different ballistic tables that show this. All of them have their pros and cons and are open to debates but one of the most lasting has been the Taylor Knock Out Rate, invented by the famous elephant hunter John "Pondoro" Taylor, the Buffalo Bill of Africa.
Now they have a computer program that any shooter can go to and check TKO rates on any cartridge of interest. In the hunting world as in the combat world, bigger is better every time. Cartridges were developed for a specific purposes. A 223 Remington was once the 222 Remington magnum, never intended for big game hunting or combat, it was designed as a varmint cartridge, to shoot nothing larger than a coyote. This along with the 22 Hornet, 222 Remington, 22-250 Rem. and the 220 Swift were designed to blow up on impact on varmints at various ranges depending on the cartridge's powder charge. The whole idea is to use a light fast bullet, and attempt to disintegrate the varmint.
With the development of the military 5.56 NATO it gave the 223 a full metal jacket bullet, now when striking a military target it could not blow up like a soft point, but it was found that the light fast bullet had other properties, it tumbled on impact causing a more deadly wound. Still when the 5.56 was used on larger human beings it was found to be somewhat lacking. So the search goes on to replace it with something like the 6.8 Remington.
In the hunting world we must first look at deer hunting which most hunters will do most likely with a rifle. The rule of thumb with a deer rifle is use the biggest thing you can use comfortably, which can be a tall order. With all things being equal the minimum TKO on a deer is a score of 10, which would be what most true gun experts would recommend as the 243 Winchester. They do that to keep everybody happy, but they really mean 7mm/08.
Strange as it may seem there are a small group that feel the 223 is a fine deer cartridge, claiming continuous one shot kills. Why I've never seen this is something to ponder, truth is almost every time I've seen a 223 and many 243 kills it was a botch job, even with good sharpshooters behind the gun.. In every case deer hit with the 243 acted more like they had been hit with an arrow and ran to bleed out. In defense of bow hunting I would rather shoot a deer in the lungs with a good broad head than a 243.
This is not the worst scenario if you have a type of terrain to track an animal. But this is not the case in Louisiana where you really don't want a deer to run too far. Yes a good rifleman can kill deer all day with head and neck shots with a 22 Hornet, but for the average deer hunter this is not the rifle to use or any of the other varmint class cartridges. The law of averages will catch up to you sooner or later and you will fire a good shot that blows up or craters on the outside of the animal and you have a lost deer situation that could be avoided by just using enough gun.
Each time I write about such things I sound more and more like Elmer Keith. My personal minimum deer rifle is a 270 Winchester, never had anything go far with it, but I seldom use it because to me a 308 or a 30-06 seems to kill a little bit better. The 300 magnums on deer and hogs fared no better than the lesser kicking 308 and 30-06, while the 300 Weatherby magnum was just plain uncomfortable to shoot.
We all know about my love affair with the 325 WSM and the Browning X-bolt rife, but to this day I don't know what they did with the kick from such a powerful rifle. Now why would someone want to deer hunt with a 325 WSM, when a 30-06 would get the job done. Simple, I cant tell the difference in recoil of the two rifles so why not go with more knock down power. I've had kids tell me they cant tell it from a 243.
Sounds a little extreme doesn't it ? Well at one time it was legal to hunt deer in my state with a 22 magnum and one old hunting partner of mine killed quite a few with his. I have killed several big wild hogs with a 22 magnum with brain shots. I got in trouble one time with a little 100 pounder when I shot him with the little Marlin behind the shoulder, he turned and charged. I turned him away with a shoulder shot and as he ran by I shot him in the rear end. He then turned to charge again and I hit him in the head and ended the fight. Not enough gun, well the same thing happened with a 222, a 300 Weatherby, a 350 Remington magnum, and a 45-70 you just can't tell about hogs.
Now my next deer rifle just might be a Marlin 45-70, I already have the H&R Buffalo classic in 45-70 which has no mercy on deer with the Hornady 325 grain flex-tip bullet I can use in either weapon.
Then I have to put up with the "shot placement is everything," crowd. Well it is to the elephant hunter with a 458 solid that must be surgically placed in the brain. The same bullet in the lungs won't do much good. Shot placement is important to the deer hunter using a varmint gun and a head or neck shot will in fact drop the deer too. But to the regular deer hunter you need three things good shot placement, a big enough caliber rifle to put your deer down right now, and a proper controlled expansion hunting bullet.
Why would Robert Ruark write a book called "Use Enough Gun" and why would Elmer Keith write volumes on big bore rifles, because something probably happened to them. I know Ruark attempted a Hyena with a 220 Swift, damn near ate him, and he dropped it with a 470. Confidence in the a firearm is measured in the knowing when you pull the trigger the battle or the hunt is over...Pass i


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FANWOOD — Tommy Mayers, 67, of Westfield was arrested on April 29 at 10:10 a.m. on a warrant out of the Essex County Sheriff's Office, police said. A Fanwood Police officer was checking out a suspicious person in the 400 block of Terrill Road, then a check of this person, identified as Mayers, showed the warrant, police said. Mayers was processed and turned over to the Essex County Sheriff's Office.
In a separate incident, Kevin Brown Jr., 21, of Plainfield was arrested on April 29 at 4:29 p.m. on warrants out of Plainfield and Newark, police said. An officer made a motor vehicle stop in the 20 block of South Avenue for an alleged violation, then a check of Brown, the driver, showed the warrants, police said. Brown was processed then released after posting bail.
More Union County news: NJ.com/Union Twitter


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Blue Water Yacht Insurance (BWYI) covers active cruising boats all over the world. Our goal is to provide insurance products and services that are crafted specifically for active cruisers. By specializing in this one area, we can focus all of our expertise and energy on that single goal - and excel! Blue Water is the leading innovator of marine insurance products in the offshore industry.
For your convenience and to better serve you, we have offices on the East and West Coasts of North America. Our objective with this web site is to provide you with current information regarding the array of marine insurance products BWI offers. Twenty years ago the founders of BWI developed the first two-crew worldwide navigation program for the Seven Seas Cruising Association. Today we have thousands of cruising yachts all over the world.
When Blue Water sailors told us that international health and accident coverage was important to them, we built a program specific to their needs.
Our exclusive on-line Quick Quote Yacht system allows you to get a BWI quote for yacht insurance, sailing insurance, or boat insurance in a matter of days on the world wide web . If you compare our quotes on and "apples to apples" basis, our comprehensive marine insurance programs have the lowest prices!
We are committed to protecting your privacy. The information you enter on our site is held in confidence between you and us. We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. This privacy statement discloses how the information you provide is used and protected.


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HARRISBURG, Pa. - A man who was sexually abused by former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky has become the first to settle a civil claim against the university, the man's attorney said today.
The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported that the young man known as "Victim 5," who testified at Sandusky's criminal trial last year, settled for several million dollars.
Attorney Tom Kline confirmed the deal in an email to The Associated Press but did not immediately provide any other details.
The paper reported the deal is the first of 26 settlements expected soon among 31 young men who have pressed claims over the actions of Sandusky.
The Inquirer said it had interviewed Kline on Friday along with Michael Rozen, one of the lawyers brought in by Penn State to resolve the civil claims.
Rozen told the paper that Victim 5's case was considered to be more serious than others because his abuse occurred in August 2001, months after top school officials were informed by a graduate assistant that he saw Sandusky assaulting a boy in a team shower.
"The pivotal issue from the university's perspective in dealing with the victims is where the incident occurred and when it occurred proximate to the 2001 shower incident," Rozen told the paper.
A spokesman for the university declined comment on the deal today, saying the school "continues to make progress on multiple settlements."
Penn State announced a year ago - the day Sandusky was convicted of 45 criminal counts - that it hoped to compensate his victims fairly and quickly.
Sandusky, 69, is serving a 30- to 60-year state prison sentence for child molestation and related offenses.
Penn State's trustees authorized some $60 million in settlements last month.


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HILO (AP) - The Coast Guard has suspended its search for a woman reported overboard from a cruise ship in Hawaii.
The search for the 54-year-old woman was suspended Friday. Crews searched more than 10,000 square miles since Wednesday.
Princess Cruises spokeswoman Julie Benson said witnesses and security video confirmed that the American passenger was "intentionally going overboard."
The cruise ship changed its course and searched for the woman in waters about 650 miles northeast of Hilo.
Benson says the ship was three days into a round-trip cruise from Hawaii to San Francisco.


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The Jail Medical Inspector's Course is a three-day course taught by members of the Florida Model Jail Standards Medical subcommittee. The curriculum covers:
Locations are currently being considered for the Jail Medical Inspector Certification courses. If you would like one in your area, please email Isaiah Dennard: firstname.lastname@example.com.
To become a "Florida Model Jail Standards Certified Jail Medical Inspector," you must successfully complete the FMJS Medical Inspector Certification Course and be recognized by the FMJS Committee to conduct medical compliance inspections. The certification is valid for four years. All FMJS medical inspectors are required to successfully complete an eight-hour recertification course every four years in order to maintain the certification.
A candidate must have the following minimum qualifications:
Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) and paramedics may be allowed to attend certification classes to become a certified inspector if they meet the following requirements:
If you have questions about the Florida Model Jail Standards program, please contact:
Isaiah Dennard
Jail Services Coordinator
Florida Sheriffs Association
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


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Learn from the experts! The M.U.D. Employee Speakers Bureau offers entertaining and informative programs on natural gas and water issues. Check out our video for a preview of what we offer!
Videos, traveling demonstrations and water plant tours for school groups illustrate the importance of natural gas and water and the safe use of these resources.
Review the available programs and library resources to the right and schedule us as part of your next event.
All programs are presented at no charge. To borrow a video or schedule one of the programs, please call 402.504.7010 or fill out the form below.


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A party isn't an epic party until it turns into a block party.
Today, Sony makes it easier to turn your party into the biggest party of the year with the introduction of the Sony SHAKE-5 shelf stereo "mini system," available later this month at the Sony Store and other electronics retailers. Here's the scoop:
Massive music
The SHAKE-5 will rattle all the neighbors' windows with its 2,400 Watt, 3-way speaker system. Uh no, that's not a typo – that's 2,400 Watts of punishing power. With its large subwoofers, separate mids and tweeters, the SHAKE-5 fills your house with sound and turns it into the town's hottest night spot.
Lights, action
No light system, no problem. The SHAKE-5 comes with multi-color LED speaker lighting that pulses in sync to the music. Use any one of the selectable LED lighting configurations to set the tone and intensity of your party playback. It's your club now.
You, the DJ
The SHAKE-5 allows you to dial in your soon-to-be-signature sound by setting your own EQ curve or choosing from one of the 14 preset EQ settings. You can also increase your booming low-end bass response by engaging the BASS BAZUCA. Even cooler yet, you can be your own DJ by using the FLANGER, ISOLATOR, SOUND FLASH or PHASER sound effects to personalize your tracks.
Stream wirelessly … or not
Stream and control your Bluetooth audio streaming experience with your compatible smartphone, tablet, digital music player or computer. And if you're lucky enough to have a mobile device with Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, enjoy simplified Bluetooth connectivity with a simple touch.
For recorded music, dual front USB inputs connect and playback USB thumb drives or playback and charge other compatible devices. Plus, you can play your favorite CDs or even your personally recorded CD-R and CD-RW discs – even MP3 files that have been recorded to CD discs. And, if you're "old school," rock the AM/FM radio.
Really, the SHAKE-5 has it all and then some. It's the biggest, baddest powerhouse on the block, and is ready to rock your socks off right out of the box. Audition the SHAKE-5 today. At $999 it's all you need to make your place the hottest club in town.


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Here's a look at some recent noteworthy stories from other media in southwest Michigan:
A Dowagiac man was sentenced to five years in prison Friday for secretly videotaping girls in his home. James Heidenreich, 57, planted a camera in a bedroom where his girlfriend's daughter was staying and another in the master bathroom. [Leader Publications]
A Canadian man was arrested on a federal warrant Friday in St. Joseph County. Anthony Albert Sove, 52, had been deported on an aggravated felony and was illegally back in the U.S. in Lockport Township. [Sturgis Journal]
The city of Plainwell has received a grant of more than $700,000 to help fund the demolition of buildings on a former paper mill property. [Allegan News]


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Manta 7000 Headphones
"So, first of all you might be wondering why even bother reviewing a headphone that nobody knows about, has ever heard of, and most likely will never own or see in real life? Simply put, I think that this headphone deserves it. There are many of the 70's Pioneer clones, so it's good to give people an idea about them if there is any interest. Pros: - Aesthetics and construction are..." --GREQ
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The Tooks Sportec Skully is a 100% ProStretch (dryfit) audio headphone beanie with flat-stitch seams for exceptional comfort. Integrated high-quality removable headphones provide superior sound quality. The perfect companion to your MP3 or MP4 media player, Ipod compatible. Unique birthday gifts, Christmas gifts, or promotional items - great under helmets too! Available in Black.


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Goodhew Micro Sport Sock - Men's
Retailers' Descriptions
Here's what other sites are saying:
Scientists from all over the world converged on Geneva last year to determine what the only thing better than a pair of Goodhew Outdoor Tech Micro Running Socks could be. The unanimous answer' Two pairs.
- Backcountry.com
Goodhew Men's Micro Sport Sock
previously retailed for:
$16.22 - $25.95
$16.22 - $25.95
The Goodhew Men's Micro Sport Sock is not available from the stores we monitor. It was last seen July 24, 2014 at Backcountry.com.
If you're looking for a new running sock, check out the best reviewed current models.


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Web posted Wednesday, June 10, 1998 6:36 a.m. CT
Palmer didn't give up, and now he's in the U.S. Open
Amarilloan qualifies for his first pro event
By LES GILES
Globe-News Sports Writer
When Ryan Palmer rolled in a 10-foot par putt on the third playoff hole on Monday at Champions Golf Club in Houston, reality set in quickly.
That single stroke enabled the 21-year-old Palmer, unquestionably Amarillo's best golfer, to qualify for next week's U.S. Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Palmer's playoff triumph against professional Jaime Gomez capped a long day at Champions' Cypress Course. He shot 74-70-144 (2-over par) in tying for second place with Gomez in the 36-hole sectional qualifier. Palmer had qualified for the sectional event by winning a local Open qualifier in May, also in the Houston area.
Even more amazing about Monday's qualifier was the fact Palmer was 6-over par after 13 holes in the morning round.
He played his final five holes in 3-under before shooting the low round in the afternoon.
The sectional qualifier, won by pro Rene Rangel, also featured PGA Tour players David Toms and Billy Ray Brown, each a former winner on the national tour.
"When I was 6-over in the morning round, I remember thinking that I was going to blow any chance that I might have," Palmer said.
"I knew that I wasn't playing that poorly, but not much was happening.
"I birdied my 14th hole, then missed a couple of decent birdie chances at the next two holes.
"I ran in a 20-footer for birdie at my 18th hole to finish the round 3-over. I knew that I'd finished pretty good, and that it would take a good round in the afternoon.
"Looking back on it now, that birdie putt at my last hole in the morning round was probably the key to the entire day.
"There was a 68, a 69, a 71 and a couple of 72s in the morning," Palmer noted. "So I knew that I would have to go out in the afternoon and play well."
He did play well in the afternoon. After nine holes he was 2-under, before a couple of bogeys sidetracked him.
"I made a good up-and-down for par at the 16th hole, then parred 17. At 18, I ran in another 20-footer for birdie that got me to 1-under for the round.
"At that point, I didn't think it would be good enough. I put my clubs in the car and was just waiting to see what happened.
"As the rest of the players finished, I could see they were shooting some high scores. I remember thinking then that maybe I'd better go back and get my clubs out of the car, just in case."
When the final scores were posted, Palmer and Gomez were tied, setting up a playoff for the trip to San Francisco.
"I wasn't too nervous during the day," Palmer said. "But when we went to the first playoff hole, it hit me big-time. Believe me, I was nervous. I could feel my knees shaking, and when I got ready to hit my tee shot (to start the playoff), I could see my hands shaking too.
"That first drive was ugly. It was a big snap-hook that went into the left rough. As it turned out, we each bogeyed the hole.
"At the next hole, I hit a great drive and was only about 170 yards (on the 450-yard hole) out. I hit my approach over the green but got it up and down for par.
"We went back to the first playoff hole, and this time I drove the ball into the right rough. I was about 230 yards out and was just thinking par would be nice.
"I got the ball on the green but was about 70 to 80 feet from the hole. I hit a great first putt, and the ball hit the lip and went about 10 feet past the hole.
"On my next putt, I made another good stroke. When it was about three feet from the hole, I knew it was going in.
"He had a chance to tie me but missed his par putt. I knew then what I'd done.
"I think that you always think, in your mind, you can do something like this. I know I've dreamed about it.
"Just think, the first professional event that I'll play in will be the U.S. Open. It can't get much better than that," said Palmer, who has hopes of playing professionally when his college career at Texas A&M is over in the spring of 1999.
For now, Palmer is not letting himself think too much about the future. Rather, he's happy to concentrate on the present, and the Open next week.
"We'll fly out (to San Francisco) on Monday, and I'll play practice rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"I think the hard part is over, just qualifying for it. Now I just want to enjoy the moment. Hopefully, it will be a good learning experience for me."
Last year, Palmer advanced past the first qualifying round, but a 79-71-150 ended his hopes.
How will he prepare for the big event next week?
"I'll just go out and try to hit a lot of balls and play some at the club (Tascosa Country Club) the rest of the week," Palmer noted. "I worked very hard on my short game before going to Houston. It helped too. That course was long. I think the average iron I hit to most par-4 holes was probably a 5 or 6. I remember hitting a lot of 4-iron approaches.
"I'm going to continue working on my short game, but I want to hit a lot of balls too.
"No matter what happens next week, I think this will be a memorable experience for me and my family."
Palmer's dad, Butch, will caddie for his son at The Olympic Club. "I wouldn't think of having anyone else on the bag," he noted. "He caddied for me at Houston, and things worked out well." PALMER
We'd love to hear your feedback. © 1998 Amarillo Globe-NewsWebmaster
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Art Print
The Day the Saucers Cameby Marion Cromb
Free Shipping on Everything - Ends Tonight at Midnight PT!
Collect your choice of gallery quality Giclée, or fine art prints custom trimmed by hand in a variety of sizes with a white border for framing.
"That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and
stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow"
-Neil Gaiman