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Contacts | | This page includes links or down-loadable files,
training documents, notes, hand-outs, and other conference materials for class
or conference participants and anyone else who may be interested. If
you would like to post your ethics or presentation materials here,
please e-mail karl.thoennes@ujs.state.sd.us. Most Recent
Addition(s): July 11, 2011: Session materials for "Social Media and the
Ethical Court Employee" delivered at the NACM conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Norman Meyer and Karl Thoennes delivered a presentation on
"Social Media and the Ethical Court Employee" at the 2011 summer conference of
the National Association for Court Management in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Session materials for the participants included:
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An extensive article on the topic by Norman Meyer,
similarly entitled "Social Media and the Ethical Court Employee."
The article was published in The Court Manager by the National
Association for Court Management, Vol. 26, Issue 1. Norman's
article packages and summarizes this quickly evolving topic very well.
A copy can be found
at this link. |
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In many ethics sessions we tend to skip over the
foundational question "what is ethics?" Karl Thoennes addressed
this topic very quickly (summarizing thousands of years of moral and
ethical development in about two minutes, ha!) with this
Ethics Overview NACM
2011.docx. |
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A one-page summary chart of the NACM Model Code of
Conduct for Court Professionals may be helpful to the session
participants, found
at this link. |
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Norman Meyer has prepared an extensive list of
references, writings, and examples on the topic of social media in the
courts that can be found
at this link. |
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Coincidentally, the Unified Judicial System in South
Dakota recently adopted a new policy on internet and social media use
for court employees and published it the day before the NACM
presentation on July 11, 2011. The policy draws from a number of
sources and other references and is the product of a great deal of
discussion and review. The social media section may be a good
starting point for other court systems considering similar policies.
South Dakota's policy can be found
at this link. |
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Finally, here's the PowerPoint file, in slide/note
format for the presentation itself. Note, this version does not
include direct links to two of the scenario videos. (The videos
were produced for the purposes of internal training programs only at two
courts and were used by special permission at the NACM conference.)
The PowerPoint file can be found
at this link. |
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The American Judicature Society, under a grant from the State
Justice Institute, published "The Ethics Fieldbook: Tools for Trainers" in 1996.
Authors/editors were Cynthia Kelly Conlon and Lisa M. Milord, with assistance by
Jeffrey M. Shaman. The Fieldbook is no longer available from the AJS
online bookstore and no longer published or available according to AJS.
Although it is just about 15 years old now, it is significantly out of date --
at least regarding the dozens or hundreds of ethics codes that have been adopted
since its publication -- but it was and still may be a valuable resource on
court ethics. For the time it gave an excellent overview of the very short
history of ethics codes for court employees. The materials were originally
published in a 3-ring binder over about 250 pages. Here's a scan in pdf in
3 parts.
Ethics
Fieldbook 1996 1 of 3 Chap 1 to 8.pdf
Ethics Fieldbook 1996 2 of 3 Chap 9 to App D2.pdf
Ethics Fieldbook 1996 3 of 3 App D3 to end.pdf
We did contact AJS in 2007 to confirm that the publication was
long out of print and no longer available, and that we could scan the binder.
However, if AJS, the State Justice Institute, the authors/editors, or anyone
else wants to assert copyright on the publication, please let us know and we
will remove the links immediately.
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In October 2008 Peter Kiefer and Karl Thoennes delivered a
session on ethics for court employees attending the Fall Conference of the
Oregon Association for Court Administration (OACA). The session included
three scenarios and two PowerPoint segments:
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In May 2008, Supreme Court staff in Malaysia asked about penalty
or other consequence provisions in judicial conduct codes. It was a very
interesting question because while most codes describe required conduct and
principles in great detail, they usually provide much less detail on penalties
or consequences for violation. Rebecca Lamprecht, a University of South
Dakota intern with the 2nd Judicial Circuit in Sioux Falls, researched the 50
states in the US looking for penalty provisions in codes, statutes, or other
documents and assembled the attached summary. Our thanks to Rebecca for
her excellent work.
Survey of
Penalty Provisions, Codes of Judicial Conduct, USA 2008
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| On September 11, 2007, Judge Glen Severson and Court
Administrators Pat Garcia Duggan and Karl Thoennes delivered a
presentation on JAIL for Judges to a group of Wyoming judges. The following
materials may be helpful to conference participants:
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| JAIL for Judges: Court administrators Patricia
Garcia Duggan and Karl Thoennes delivered a presentation on the proposed constitutional amendment
in South Dakota in
2006 that would have stripped judges and others of personal legal immunity
for official actions (among other things). Presentation materials can be found at the links below, except for the
11-minute video published by "No on E" advocates; for a copy of
that video (DVD on CD) please e-mail karl.thoennes@ujs.state.sd.us.
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Court managers Peter Kiefer, Pam Harris, David Slayton,
and Karl Thoennes presented a proposed, draft revision to the Code of Ethics
for the National Association
for Court Management (NACM) at its conference in
February 2007 in New York. Copies of the draft code with commentary can
be found at
this link. Copies of the PowerPoint presentation (still also in
draft form) can be found at
this link. |
| Judge Timothy Baland and Karl Thoennes participated in a panel discussion and
delivered a presentation on
comparative judicial and court ethics codes at the World Ethics Forum in
April 2006 in Oxford, England. Judge
Baland's summary paper Measuring
Judicial Ethics is available here in Microsoft Word format (.doc).
A copy of the PowerPoint presentation Comparative
Judicial Ethics also available, although the file is about 9 MB so it
will take some time to download.
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