Monthly Archives: May 2004

The Guardian reports that in Ireland they have their own approach to keeping financial markets clean—Irish bank boss quits over adult sites:

The Irish banking sector was dealt another blow this weekend with the resignation of the chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, Michael Soden.

Mr Soden resigned on Saturday after he admitted breaking company guidelines by accessing internet sites containing adult content. He is also expected to step down from the board of the Post Office, a role he took up after the Bank of Ireland signed a deal with the Royal Mail's retail arm.

A spokesman for the bank said directors would meet this week to discuss Mr Soden's replacement and payoff.

The experienced banking executive said he deeply regretted the embarrassment he had caused the bank by breaching its policies on internet use.

“I have made it a central part of my tenure to set the highest standards of integrity and behaviour and to do so in an environment of accountability, transparency and openness,” he said. “I now accept that accessing this material was inappropriate and would cause embarrassment to Bank of Ireland and people who work there.”

Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern yesterday said Mr Soden's resignation and a growing scandal at Allied Irish Bank had jeopardised the credibility of the Irish financial industry. “It can't get much worse.”

Perhaps Mr. Soden should look for a job in Denmark?

Charles Petit has a blog whose content is so good I read it despite the layout, which (at least on Firefox with my defaults) produces a color scheme and crowded typeface that I actually find disturbing. Here's the start of an especially good recent post:

It's alive: The Ninth Circuit gave us a true Frankenstein moment on Monday. In Thinket Ink (PDF), a panel held that

if a corporation either suffers discrimination harm cognizable under § 1981, or has acquired an imputed racial identity, it is sufficiently within the statutory zone of interest to have prudential standing to bring an action under § 1981.

Id., slip op. at 6343 (emphasis added).

Why is this a Frankenstein moment? Because by implication it means that the corporation, an unnatural person, has taken on yet more aspects from natural (real) persons: race, religion, ethnicity, and gender. This leads to some very, very interesting (and difficult) questions of constitutional and statutory interpretation; and of the relationship among law, policy, and reality; and of speculative fiction.

There's more where that came from, plus other stuff about “Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing!) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.”