The March 2000 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Judge John M. Cleland.

Charged with trespass and disorderly conduct for blocking trucks from delivering logs from the Allegheny National Forest  to a chip mill, two forest activists, Shannon Hughes and Josh Raisler Cohn, agreed to a deal sentencing them to 50 hours of community service. Judge Cleland ordered the two to spend those 50 hours researching and writing a paper "supporting the concept of selective cutting on the Allegheny National Forest for the preservation of black cherry and other valuable timber" -- an industry position.

(Source: Julie Mickens, "A Sentence of Sentences," Pittsburgh City Paper, July 12, 2000; Thanks to Ned Daly for sending in this item.)

*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.