Entries by Jeffrey Kaplan

Is Wall Street a bad ethical neighborhood?

[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog] For many years I taught ethics in the executive MBA program of a New York area business school. Because of the school’s location, the “day job” for many of the students was in the financial services field, and on average they seemed less ethics-focused than […]

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Risk assessment: law, economics, morality science…and liquor

[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog] Many years ago a client who was in the compliance department of a pharma company told me his strategy for conducting risk assessments.  He would schedule the interviews of sales people – a key, but typically difficult, constituency for nearly any risk assessment – to begin […]

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Effective C&E Programs: The Justice Department Speaks

[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog] Last week, together with David Wilkins of SNC-Lavalin, I chaired the Practising Law Institute’s Advanced Compliance & Ethics Workshop.  Marshall Miller, the number 2 in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, gave the keynote address, which was subsequently posted on the Department’s web site.  Among […]

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Prosecutors, massive fines and moral hazard

[This essay was originally posted on the Conflict of Interest Blog.] Many years ago, I lived next door to a young police officer and his family who, while presumably paid a modest salary, drove a pretty expensive car.   He was able to do this, I learned, because his department seized autos (and other property) of various […]

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New proof that good ethics is good business

[This essay was originally posted to The Conflict of Interest Blog]  In a simpler economic time, the tangible rewards to oneself from doing good for others were fairly self-evident. A memorable articulation of this (from a chronicler of Eskimo life who is quoted in Robert Wright’s book  Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny [public library]): […]

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Risk Assessment – By the Book

[This essay was originally posted on Corporate Compliance Insights.] Nothing is more important to developing and maintaining an effective C&E program than risk assessment, and effective risk assessment is, as a general matter, perhaps the most daunting task a C&E officer is likely to face.  The challenges are both conceptual (a surprising lack of consensus […]

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Meet “Homo Duplex” – a new ethics super-hero?

[This essay was originally posted on The Conflict of Interest Blog.] In “Behavioral Ethics for Homo Economicus, Homo Heuristicus and Homo Duplex” – which is published in the March 2004 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes – Jesse Kluver, Rebecca Frazier and Jonathan Haidt describe three views of human nature and consider the implications […]

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A system for teaching ethical systems

A system for teaching ethical systems Jeffrey M. Kaplan When I used to teach a section of a Professional Responsibility business school class I wanted to get the students thinking more from a preventive organizational approach to ethics than what was contemplated by the course materials that the school provided. To that end, on the first […]

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Exemplary Ethical Recoveries

[This essay was originally posted on The Conflict of Interest Blog.] F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but in the C&E world the second act may count for more than the first – for better or worse. Instances of the latter – tragic second acts – include various […]

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