The Speaker of the New York Assembly was indicted yesterday on corruption charges related to payments to his private law practice for which where he performed little or no legal work.

It prompted this anecdote on the front page of the New York Times:

Al Smith, the storied governor of New York in the 1920s who laid the groundwork for the New Deal, has been credited with making a famously cynical remark as he walked through a law school library. He spotted a student, bent over books and reading.

“There,” Smith supposedly said, “is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.”

That’s not what Telford Taylor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught me at law school.

What I learned was that the rule of law is supposed to apply equally to everyone.

Moreover, when individuals fail to do the right thing on their own initiative, laws – civil rights, consumer protection, anti-trust, among many others, require them to do the right thing.