Been off the forum for a while. Just occurred to me that I forgot to post about this, and I felt sad for the foregone expected utils. So I was glad to see that you signal boosted this again for 2024. Good luck to everyone entering!

I think it's plausible that grant recipients in countries other than the United States could be subject to clawback action under the laws of those countries, and the applicable limitation period may well be longer.

In my case, I won't be totally certain until the six year limitation period under New Zealand law has run. Luckily there are much more favourable defences under New Zealand law, and even if their prospects of success were higher I somewhat doubt that Sullivan & Cromwell would bother instructing New Zealand counsel to chase up a relatively meagre grant.

If your grant was small (e.g. salary/expenses for one person), you might adopt the same "she'll be right" attitude I'm taking to this. But if you're based in a country other than the United States and got a big grant then you may want to keep this risk in the back of your mind and/or speak with a lawyer in that country.

Epistemic status: I suspect it's more of a hypothetical risk than a real one, but mentioning it for completeness and for the benefit of folks with a very low appetite for risk.

Yasssssssss

Thanks heaps Angelina - I agree. Thanks for pointing out the need for clarification.

I'm surprised to see many comments that treat something other than this (particularly the request to transport drugs across a country border) as the crux.

From my read of Ben Pace's post, Nonlinear admits that this is true.

Yes, although objectivity and independence trades off against other things EA orgs might value in a lawyer. I think of the 'EA lawyer' idea similarly to the idea of an in-house lawyer - and in my previous practice as an in-house lawyer sometimes we would go to external lawyers for objectivity/professional distance (and not just for, say, specialist expertise).

Apologies for the delayed response.

Quick thoughts, which are further questions rather than answers. I don't have a good answer off the top of my head, but these are the kinds of questions I'd think about to kick off my research if I were looking into this:

- pledge that you give to a particular legal person in the future might be enforceable by that person (but, depending on the rules in your particular jurisdiction, you might be able to evade such a pledge on the basis of how one-sided it would be);
- not sure whether you could make a more open ended pledge (to a particular cause but not a particular org, or cause neutrally), because it wouldn't really be clear who would have standing to bring a claim to make you go ahead with the case;
- a slightly different approach could be to put assets you have already into a non-profit.

I would like to know the answer to this question too, but don't have time to look into it right now. If someone else doesn't chime in, I may come back to this in the new year.

To clarify, my update isn't that I think there shouldn't be a "did anybody know" aspect to the investigation - but rather that a broader fact-finding review would be useful, and that my original suggestion was probably too narrow.

I would like to know, for example, whether any large EA orgs (and EA thinkers, I suppose too) have formally engaged with those criticism contest entries. Like, was it somebody's job to think about when anything should change as a result? Or something discussed by a governance board (or similar)?

This comment is being downvoted, but I think it's probably a worthwhile exercise (even though I expect it to be really net negative)