News Archive

Voters will determine whether a Terre Haute police officer should keep his other full-time job as Vigo County’s elected Circuit Court clerk, Professor David Orentlicher said in a news story published in the Terre Haute Tribune Star on March 25.

Police officers are among those exempted from a state law that prohibits someone from having two public positions at the same time.

“How do you know whether the person is being responsible or not? It is just too hard to tell if they are skirting duties,” Professor Orentlicher said in the story. “To protect against that, it is best to be there full-time. Ethically, if someone is taking a second job, it can divert their attention, and if it is a second full-time job, it seems the risk of diverting attention is too great.”

Professor Orentlicher served in the Indiana House of Representatives from 2002 through 2008. He is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at IU McKinney and co-director of the Hall Center for Law and Health. He also has taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago Law School. He earned degrees in law and medicine at Harvard and specializes in health care law and ethics. He also is the author of Two Presidents Are Better Than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch, which was published by NYU Press in 2013.