Follow up report on ECOA conference

From: RDShatt
To: ___________
Sent: 10/1/2009 5:38:37 P.M. Central Daylight Time

Subj: Follow up report on ECOA conference

Dear ECOA conference attendee or other member,

Prior to the ECOA's 17th Annual Business Ethics and Compliance Conference last week, I sent a number of conference speakers emails asking questions and making comments in reference to their respective presentations (based on the descriptions of the presentations in the program brochure).

All the emails I sent had a commonality of being derived from my contention that the United States civil law liability system (i) undermines business ethics, (ii) results in a waste of limited corporate resources that could be better deployed in other ways to promote ethical corporate behavior, and (iii) improperly distorts risk assessment and results in the adoption of costly and uneconomic "defensive" corporate practices (like the practice of "defensive" medicine which is currently in the national spotlight as a driver of escalating health care costs that the United States is trying to control).

My emails to those conference speakers are reproduced here (reproduced in the order the presentation descriptions appear in the program brochure).

After I sent those emails, I sent emails to my address list of ECOA members (or possible members) including you, in the form of this, and I sent other conference speakers an email in the form of this.

Following the end of the conference last Friday I did further follow up emails to the conference speakers in the forms of this and this.

Thus far, I have had a response from only one conference speaker, saying he would read my article.

I find the lack of response lamentable, but it is not for my lack of trying. If I hereafter get any responses of material substance from conference speakers, I will post them in my blog.

I did not attend the ECOA conference so I do not know whether any conference speaker said anything about my subject in his or her presentation.

If you have any comments about my contentions, I would very much like to hear from you and, with your permission, publish them in my blog for the edification of other ethics officers and professionals.

If it should interest you, I am trying to get a "scholarly" manuscript on my subject published in an ethics journal. You may read about my efforts here.

I hope I hear from you.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Robert Shattuck