Gun For Hire Research Articles

Regulating more? Comparing Ireland’s original and amended lobbying legislation

Abstract This paper compares the amendments introduced by the Regulation of Lobbying and Oireachtas (Allowances to Members) (Amendment) Act 2023 with the original regulations of the Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015. The study was conducted using the Hired Guns Method for assessing the robustness of lobbying legislation, developed by the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI), allowing findings to be compared with lobbying regulations internationally. The 2015 legislation was introduced after years of tribunals, scandals, unfulfilled political promises, and economic crisis, in an effort to increase the public’s trust in politicians, representative institutions, democracy and the wider bureaucracy. The 2023 Amendment came in the wake of a 2020 lobbying scandal. The paper finds that, despite the CPI score remaining unchanged, in-depth examination of the legislation showed that the amendment introduced more rules and sanctions, particularly in relation to designated public officials, and closed off outstanding legislative loopholes.

Policy Shops, Hired Guns and Gatekeepers: The Allocation of Policy Analysts in Government Agencies

Policy professionals play an important role in political and administrative systems. They provide an important connective tissue between elected politicians and the civil service system. However, the exact configuration of such personnel among and between line and staff agencies is largely unknown. Early works looking at the emergence of professional policy analysts, mainly in the United States, noted the creation of small dedicated ‘policy shops’ in many governments after 1960 where many policy professionals were located. Studies in Canada and elsewhere subsequently confirmed this organizational characteristic but failed to examine in depth question such as how many professionals were employed and where these units were located within existing Departmental structure. In this article we provide a network mapping of policy personnel within the Ontario Public Service (OPS), a provincial government in Canada administering a population approximately 50% larger than Sweden. We find that four major personnel distribution patterns are evident within the OPS. Within single issue departments (such as Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs) we only find integrated policy shops of the kind first noted in early studies. However, this is not the only pattern. Rather in multi-issue departments that deal with complex or controversial issues (such as the Environment or Health), we find such shops in each major issue area. And we also find that both of these patterns are absent in central staff agencies such as Finance or Treasury Board where senior policy shops staffed by ‘gatekeeper’ policy professionals exist. Finally, we find a ‘hired guns’ pattern in key emerging issue areas such as climate change or, in the Ontario case, indigenous affairs, which are assigned additional policy capacity in the form of a cadre of policy professionals distributed throughout the organization in order to help deal with problems. These findings suggest the need to re-evaluate the organization and staffing of professional policy analysis in government in order to account for these different patterns of personnel.

The Irishman

The Irishman Robert Hensley-King The Irishman 2019 Directed by Martin Scorsese Distributed by Netflix Netflix.com 209 minutes An old man looks back on a life of crime. There is something beautifully elegiac about Martin Scorsese's film The Irishman. As well as recounting the tale of the enigmatic Frank Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro) looking back on his career in organized crime, it brings together many of the thematic and formal elements that have come to define a Scorsese film. This film presents a multi-layered and subtle treatment of faith, the Mafia, family, friendship, and loyalty in a manner that pushes boundaries, while being familiar to those who know Scorsese's work. The film is astonishing in its sensitive treatment of Frank's competing and divergent worlds. As well as its cinematic importance, it offers both an insightful commentary on the human condition and many avenues for further study. The Irishman is a treatment of Charles Brandt's book I Heard You Paint Houses. From the opening voiceover onward, Frank looks back on his life after serving in World War II in Italy. Having started out as a Teamsters union-card-carrying truck driver who turns to petty larceny to provide for his growing family, a chance meeting changes his life. This same meeting and a willingness to keep quiet when questioned allows him to catch the eye of Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci). Russell (Russ) introduces Frank to Mafia boss Angelo Bruno (played by Harvey Keitel), and schools him in the ways of the Mafia. Thanks to Russ's protection and friendship, Frank becomes a feared and respected gun for hire in the Mafia. As part of his work, Frank becomes a bodyguard for the Teamsters union president, Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino). Frank forms a close friendship with Jimmy and, with encouragement from Russ, becomes a consigliere to Jimmy, encouraging peace with his foes. Like many of Scorsese's gangsters, there is an attractive naivete to Frank, which helps him attract audience empathy as a killer. Frank is not completely in control of his world. His lack of autonomy is evident in the themes common to many of Scorsese's antiheroic protagonists: balancing loyalties to his friends, the Mafia, his family, and religion – specifically Catholicism. While these themes are familiar in Scorsese's work, The Irishman is unique in that it treats them from the perspective of age. This merits closer scrutiny in that it offers both continuity and innovation in what marks The Irishman as a film worthy of both critical and academic attention. The Irishman has a particular appeal for a breadth of audiences in that it reunites Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel, who are strongly associated with Scorsese's treatment of the Mafia. In this film, Scorsese also directed icon of the gangster subgenre Al Pacino for the first time. This results in numerous intertextual homages to Mafia films and more specifically to his own work. The (re)union of the cast and numerous textual and intertextual references are helped by the emerging de/ageing technology. While it is not yet perfect, when combined with the power of Scorsese and his collaborators to draw audiences into his narrative ensures that one quickly engages with the film. This is helped by seeing old screen friends in a new tale. The Irishman adds a new element to Scorsese's treatment of friendship by showing how Russ and Jimmy are affected by historical events. While Scorsese has always taken care to contextualize his films historically. This time he plays with history in fictive ways that comment on Russ and Jimmy as individuals and in relation to Frank. The multiple loyalties are combined with a politically charged situation in which the political interests of Russ and Jimmy grow further apart. Frank must navigate the many layers of competing fictive truths as well as his complex ties to both men. Russ has his reasons for supporting President Kennedy just has Jimmy has his reasons for siding with President Nixon. [End Page 43] Looking back on his life, Frank acknowledges the significance of Russ as a mentor. While the two are friends there is...

Guns for hire and enduring machines: clientelism beyond parties in Indonesia and the Philippines

ABSTRACTSince their transitions to democracy, electoral politics in Indonesia and the Philippines have become heavily clientelistic, marked by high levels of vote-buying and other forms of material exchange. In both cases, the organizational form taken by clientelism is similar: political candidates build informal pyramidal structures of brokers to connect them to voters, largely operating outside national parties. In the Philippines, these structures are local machines; in Indonesia, they are ephemeral organizations known as “success teams.” Yet this similarity in form masks a deeper dissimilarity: in the Philippines, machines are built on a relational clientelism in which politicians cultivate brokers for the long-term; in Indonesia, the modal pattern is short-term transactional relationships. We demonstrate this distinction by drawing on fieldwork and broker surveys conducted in both countries, and attribute it to a combination of historical legacies and electoral rules. In particular, differences in electoral institutions shape the incentives and capacities of politicians to invest in lasting machines, encouraging coordination among candidates when building campaign structures and sharing resources in the Philippines; impeding such cooperation in Indonesia. Our analysis suggests that scholars of patronage politics need to look beyond parties and to consider differences between relational and transactional varieties of clientelism.

Evolutionary entanglement of mobile genetic elements and host defence systems: guns for hire.

All cellular life forms are afflicted by diverse genetic parasites, including viruses and other types of mobile genetic elements (MGEs), and have evolved multiple, diverse defence systems that protect them from MGE assault via different mechanisms. Here, we provide our perspectives on how recent evidence points to tight evolutionary connections between MGEs and defence systems that reach far beyond the proverbial arms race. Defence systems incur a fitness cost for the hosts; therefore, at least in prokaryotes, horizontal mobility of defence systems, mediated primarily by MGEs, is essential for their persistence. Moreover, defence systems themselves possess certain features of selfish elements. Common components of MGEs, such as site-specific nucleases, are 'guns for hire' that can also function as parts of defence mechanisms and are often shuttled between MGEs and defence systems. Thus, evolutionary and molecular factors converge to mould the multifaceted, inextricable connection between MGEs and anti-MGE defence systems.

Mobile Genetic Elements and Evolution of CRISPR-Cas Systems: All the Way There and Back.

The Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas) systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity show multifaceted evolutionary relationships with at least five classes of mobile genetic elements (MGE). First, the adaptation module of CRISPR-Cas that is responsible for the formation of the immune memory apparently evolved from a Casposon, a self-synthesizing transposon that employs the Cas1 protein as the integrase and might have brought additional cas genes to the emerging immunity loci. Second, a large subset of type III CRISPR-Cas systems recruited a reverse transcriptase from a Group II intron, providing for spacer acquisition from RNA. Third, effector nucleases of Class 2 CRISPR-Cas systems that are responsible for the recognition and cleavage of the target DNA were derived from transposon-encoded TnpB nucleases, most likely, on several independent occasions. Fourth, accessory nucleases in some variants of types I and III toxin and type VI effectors RNases appear to be ultimately derived from toxin nucleases of microbial toxin–antitoxin modules. Fifth, the opposite direction of evolution is manifested in the recruitment of CRISPR-Cas systems by a distinct family of Tn7-like transposons that probably exploit the capacity of CRISPR-Cas to recognize unique DNA sites to facilitate transposition as well as by bacteriophages that employ them to cope with host defense. Additionally, individual Cas proteins, such as the Cas4 nuclease, were recruited by bacteriophages and transposons. The two-sided evolutionary connection between CRISPR-Cas and MGE fits the “guns for hire” paradigm whereby homologous enzymatic machineries, in particular nucleases, are shuttled between MGE and defense systems and are used alternately as means of offense or defense.

Neutral – Neither Trustees nor Hired Guns: The Experiences and Preferences of Local Government Councillors of NSW Australia

AbstractThis paper reports on the preferences and experiences of the councillor level of New South Wales (NSW, Australia) local government, concerning the public service values that guide the council staff working under a politicised employment relationship. The results of the study show that councillors perceive council staff to be as largely neutral in their behaviour as they expect them to be. The paper further reports that the council staff (in the view of councillors) do not politically respond to any unreasonable demands made by elected officials or act as the trustee of the public interest in competition with them. Data for this study were collected through interviews, a survey, and from secondary sources.

Public Stewards or Hired Guns?: An Inquiry into Engineering Education

The world is facing converging crises of overpopulation and urbanization, resource depletion and globalwarming, political tension and unrest. Often, we call upon engineers, as technical experts, to addressthese issues. Engineers are allotted a large amount of decision‐making influence and power based ontheir assumed knowledge and skill sets. However, there is perhaps a danger in giving influence toindividuals with a limited understanding of social, political and environmental issues. In the words of Donna Riley, “The profession of engineering…has historically served the status quo, feeding an ever‐expanding materialistic and militaristic culture, remaining relatively unresponsive to public concerns, and without significant pressure for change from within” (Riley, 2008). This inquiry seeks to ask: “Are engineers truly prepared to tackle today’s contemporary issues?” by exploring the nature of the engineering industry in the 21st century, engineering education broadly, and the Applied Science Curriculum at Queen’s University specifically. It will draw on both independent research and focus groups with Applied Science students. Particular themes which will be explored include the engineering design process, the understanding of power relationships and the need for interdisciplinarity.

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Les dames de l’estuaire par Alain Gagnon

tries to understand what happened to the young boy, Frappat’s terse prose allows the reader to enter into Laura’s frantic thoughts: “Aucune fenêtre n’est ouverte. Dans la dernière chambre, la cabine de phare où j’entre seule, je suis assaillie par une sensation étrange. Peut-être un inconnu, derrière les murs courbes d’une illusion d’optique, m’observe-t-il” (20). It is at this precise moment that the reader must begin to be attentive to the role that children’s nursery rhymes will play in the unraveling of the disturbing mystery as Laura thinks to herself: “[L]es paroles de la comptine flottent dans l’air et je m’y cogne” (20). In the decisive battle against irrational fears, Laura resists valiantly, armed with Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (which later proves to be the key to the plot’s intrigue), a black stone, a song, and memories. It is exactly this deft combination of literary elements and play on childhood fears by Frappat that engrosses the reader into the plot of Lady Hunt. As a result, the reader cannot help but feeling trapped in a cinematic spine-chilling world of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick. Furthermore, one questions the purpose of a nursery rhyme: is it to help a child to fall asleep more easily and have beautiful dreams or to cause the child to toss and turn in bed while having nightmares? From beginning to end, Lady Hunt is a thrilling read and will not disappoint the reader who would like to approximate the sensations of true fear. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Gagnon, Alain. Les dames de l’estuaire. Montréal: Triptyque, 2013. ISBN 978-289031 -892-2. Pp. 153. $20 Can. In“La toupie”, the first of Gagnon’s three“novellas,”a half-poetic, half-prose tale, Andrei Bertov sails to Haut-fond Prince, in French Canada. He is a man torn between his Ukrainian heritage and the life of “pigiste” he has made for himself in Montréal. However, he is haunted by a recurring nightmare, involving his two best friends, an avalanche, and an unending walk to Kiev. He has made this voyage to Haut-fond Prince to live alone for a month inside the lighthouse, La Toupie. He will atone for a sin he thinks he has committed, and be part of this estuary from Orléans to the mouth of the Saguenay,“pays de brouillards et de vents iodé”(10). He will write of the storms that pass, in the hopes of working through the maelstrom in his head. The writer’s use of italics for his flashbacks works very well here. Gagnon is a prolific author who has won multiple literary prizes, particularly for his poetry. The first lady of the estuary was “La toupie.” The second is “La dame aux glaïeuls.” In this novella, Jared is a man who, wishing to finish his novel, takes on the role of off-season caretaker in a hotel lost between the Saint-Laurent and the Appalachians. His friends warn him of the isolation, the cold, and the shadows of the residence. Gagnon interrupts his story with various definitions and descriptions of the gladiola for which the hotel is named. Jared becomes concerned when, while putting together several paranormal experiences, he 262 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 263 meets his sole neighbor whose girlfriend is named and looks like his ex-wife Gladia. Gagnon uses“pathetic fallacy”to convey mood:“Fuir loin de ce chalet,de cette auberge, de ce village aux maisons placardées, de ces rivages maudits qu’il aimait pourtant si fort en été, jadis”(73). Jared’s descent into madness is well documented by the author; the reader sits at the edge of his seat.“Le gambit de la dame” is the final novella. Sam, our protagonist, is a gun for hire. He, just like Andrei and Jared, is a writer living alone. Sam’s career and love for chess began while he was living and working at his uncle’s farm. One of his relatives was a captive of a “zugzwang” move in chess...

Training Lawyers - Healers or Hired Guns?

Training Lawyers - Healers or Hired Guns?

Gun for hire: Delegated enforcement and peer punishment in public goods provision

This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the “hired gun” mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. Small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader—the department chair, the building superintendent, and the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. The hired gun mechanism is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliance as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% and 40%. Moreover, the lion's share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.

Picturegoer: The Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During The Second World War

‘What agent of Chancellor Hitler is it who has suggested that we should all cower in darkness and terror “for the duration”?’, demanded George Bernard Shaw in a letter to the Times. Published on 5 ...

American Dream States

American Dream States Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) The New American Exceptionalism. Donald E. Pease. University of Minnesota Press. http://www.upress.umn.edu. 264 pages; cloth, $67.50; paper, $22.50. When everyone rises at the beginning of a baseball game to sing the national anthem, I also do. I apparently murmur its words along with everyone else. In fact, I murmur instead the refrain of a late 1950s-early 1960s TV Western, starring Richard Boone, Have Gun—Will Travel: "Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam? / Paladin, Paladin, far, far from home. / His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind. / A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin"...and so on until the rest of the crowd and I stop singing at the same time. Donald E. Pease, a leading Americanist scholar, demonstrates in his new book why and how in this initial anecdote both the typical action of the crowd and my critical reaction are equally authorized by the state and the dream logic of its hegemonic national fantasies. Basing himself on the work of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacqueline Rose in States of Fantasy (1998) (among others), Pease shows how during the Cold War the US perfected a narrative of the exceptional status of America among the history of nations and in the contemporaneous international order. However specifically framed (circumstances produced responsive variations), the narrative always has America as being a nation apart in a binary struggle to the death with the Soviet Union. When the state, in one or another of its symbolic functions or events, calls forth its citizen-subjects ("interpellation" Athusser would say), they, by investing in and identifying with the logic of this fantasy narrative, thereby are authorized as acceptable, as are their individual fantasizes of identity. The subjects, that is, identify actively and directly with the will of the state, and the state then empowers their wills. Although Paladin, the hero of my favorite childhood Western which I watch on cable in reruns these days, is swarthy, exotic in his tastes in food, wine, and women; quotes Shakespeare at every turn of events; and has a Arab-sounding name suggestive of un-Americanism, especially given his symbol, the figure of the Knight in chest, a game originating in India; the show nevertheless, in its moralizing grandeur and melodramatic shoot-'em-up plots, always underscores the exceptional nature of America—its people, its laws, its land. In one memorable show, Paladin turns prosecutor in the town saloon, and wins his case before a jury of criminal outcasts. Pease would argue, given what he says in his book, that my acceptance of the fantasy of American exceptionalism, Cold War style, is passive, ironic, indirect, more literary and aesthetic—but nonetheless what I do, say, believe, and feel, every sign of my agency, is still necessarily conducted within the framework of the Cold War fantasy of American exceptionalism and its more actively and directly identified with narrative. Or, at least, this was the case. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end, so did the authorizing state fantasy of the national security state—the other name for America's exceptionalism. The 1990s, the period that Pease analyzes closely, sees the contest, a true agon, among candidates for replacing the old Cold War fantasy. The chapter titles pretty much tell the story of that decade: "Staging The New World Order: Hiroshima, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Persian Gulf War," "America of the Two Covenants: The Waco Siege and the Oklahoma City Bombing," "A National Rite of Passage: The Return of Alexis de Tocqueville," "Patriot Acts: The Southernification of America," "From Virgin Land to Ground Zero: Mythological Foundations of the Homeland Security State," and "Antigone's Kin: From Abu Ghraib to Barack Obama." As George H.W. Bush's New World Order, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and Bill Clinton's New Covenant fight to install their new state fantasy amidst unforeseen events of a global as well as local yet still catastrophic kind, only the events of 9/11 give Bush 2 the bloody rationale for the acceptance of the new...

Dark borders: film noir and American citizenship

Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Un-Americanness of Film Noir 1. Gestapo in America (Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Stranger on the Third Floor) 2. White-Collar Murder (Double Indemnity) 3. Cuba, Gangsters, Vets, and Other Outcasts of the Islands (The Chase and Key Largo) 4. North from Mexico (Border Incident, Hold Back the Dawn, Secret Beyond the Door, and Out of the Past) 5. Bad Boy Patriots (This Gun for Hire, Ride the Pink Horse, Pickup on South Street) Postscript: Darkness Visible Notes Bibliography Index

The People’s Hired Guns? Experimentally Testing the Inclination of Prosecutors to Abuse the Vague Definition of Crimes

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely defined crimes, like “conspiracy”. We model the situation as a signalling game and test it experimentally. If we have participants play the naked game, at least a minority plays the game theoretic equilibrium and use the vague rule if a signal indicates that the defendant is guilty. This becomes even slightly more frequent if a misbehaving defendant imposes harm on a third participant. By contrast if we frame the situation as a court case, almost all prosecutors take the signal at face value and knowingly run the risk of loosing in court if the signal was false. Our experimental prosecutors behave like textbook legal idealists, and follow the urge of duty.

The People’s Hired Guns? Experimentally Testing the Inclination of Prosecutors to Abuse the Vague Definition of Crimes

Legal realists expect prosecutors to be selfish. If they get the defendant convicted, this helps them advance their careers. If the odds of winning on the main charge are low, prosecutors have a second option. They can exploit the ambiguity of legal doctrine and charge the defendant for vaguely defined crimes, like “conspiracy”. We model the situation as a signalling game and test it experimentally. If we have participants play the naked game, at least a minority plays the game theoretic equilibrium and use the vague rule if a signal indicates that the defendant is guilty. This becomes even slightly more frequent if a misbehaving defendant imposes harm on a third participant. By contrast if we frame the situation as a court case, almost all prosecutors take the signal at face value and knowingly run the risk of loosing in court if the signal was false. Our experimental prosecutors behave like textbook legal idealists, and follow the urge of duty.

Loyalty in the Military: Some Preliminary Reflections

Loyalty in the Military: Some Preliminary Reflections

This Gun for Hire: Dancing in the Dark of the First Amendment

Classified advertisements in newspapers and magazines represent a uniquely democratic access to the media for the individual. Without having to pay the thousands of dollars for full-page advertisements, and sellers can purchase space for their offers for only a few dollars, yet have them seen by city-wide or nation-wide audiences. Democracy, though, breeds its own excesses, and the legal question is always how to control that excess without harming the freedom.As befits a medium open to all, classified advertisements run the gamut of human activity, from the sale of a used automobile to employment to lonely singles looking for an attractive. nonsmoking, athletic mate. Unfortunately, classified advertisements also have been used as part of criminal activities, to help buyers locate those willing to kidnap or murder for the going rate.Victims, or the families of victims, of these crimes facilitated by classified advertisements have sued the publisher of the advertisements for damages. Courts have been uncertain, at best, how to evaluate these lawsuits. Through an unclear mixture of tort law and commercial speech doctrine, courts have failed to announce a clear standard to guide the conduct of publishers. This article will attempt to clarify the conflicting legal standards and describe a usable test that would both protect publishers from unnecessarily onerous burdens of investigating all classified advertisements and protect the public against the danger of the hired gun.