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Lawyer Discipline In An Authoritarian Regime: Empirical Insights From Zhejiang Province, China, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Benjamin Van Rooij, Sida Liu Oct 2017

Lawyer Discipline In An Authoritarian Regime: Empirical Insights From Zhejiang Province, China, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Benjamin Van Rooij, Sida Liu

Judith A. McMorrow

On paper the state-run lawyer disciplinary system in China serves multiple interests: client protection, maintaining the reputation of the legal profession, upholding the rule of law, and safeguarding the party-state authority. This Article assesses which of these interests dominates in the lawyer disciplinary process by analyzing 122 published lawyer discipline cases from Zhejiang Province from 2007-2015. These records of lawyer discipline evidence an authoritarian political logic of attorney discipline, with punishment most clearly serving to safeguard the Communist Party's rule by keeping lawyers in bounds and tightly tied to their law firms. Subordinate to this are other state interests such …


Moving From A Brandeis Brief To A Brandeis Law Firm: Challenges And Opportunities For Holistic Legal Services In The United States, Judith A. Mcmorrow Jun 2017

Moving From A Brandeis Brief To A Brandeis Law Firm: Challenges And Opportunities For Holistic Legal Services In The United States, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The need for multidisciplinary approaches to legal services has given rise to increasingly creative service delivery models. The phenomenon is a natural outgrowth of three important ideas that Louis Brandeis developed. First, his work gave rise to the concept of the Brandeis Brief, which in its broader meaning has become a metaphor for the relevance of such social science insights to legal problem-solving. Second, Brandeis introduced the concept of “counsel for the situation” to capture a vision of lawyering that provided a broader identification of the interests involved, again with an orientation on problem-solving. A third idea championed by Brandeis …


Toward An Ecclesiastical Professional Ethic: Lessons From The Legal Profession, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Toward An Ecclesiastical Professional Ethic: Lessons From The Legal Profession, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

As the Catholic Church struggles with the aftermath of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, some have explored the possibility of an ecclesiastical code of professional conduct. Lawyers' long and storied history with professional codes offers a cautionary tale to those exploring an ecclesiastical code of ethics. As priests to our secular religion of law, lawyers are called forth and mandated by a competent authority to function in a defined role, the specifics of which are reflected, in part, in lawyer codes. As lawyers moved from Canons of Ethics (1908) to a Code of Professional Responsibility (1969) to Rules of Professional …


Law And Lawyers In The U.S.: The Hero-Villain Dichotomy, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Law And Lawyers In The U.S.: The Hero-Villain Dichotomy, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

Lawyers in U.S. culture are often presented in either an extremely positive or extremely negative light. Although popular culture exaggerates and oversimplifies the 'good v. bad' dynamic of lawyers, this dichotomy provides important insights into the role attorneys play in the U.S. legal system, the boundaries of legal ethics, and the extent to which the U.S. legal system is relied upon to address our society's great moral and social dilemmas.


Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

In his 1994 seminal article on Federalizing Legal Ethics, Prof. Fred Zacharias examined the need for a national and uniform code of ethics for attorneys. Prof. Zacharias was correct that there has been increasing pressure to federalize legal ethics, but that process is occurring not through articulation of national norms but rather through decentralized contextualization of attorney conduct norms. Federal agencies that direct securities practice, immigration, tax, patent, labor and many other areas of federal practice are increasingly supplementing state regulations to specifically regulate the attorneys who appear before their agencies. Targeted substantive federal law and treaty obligations also increasingly …


Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The rapidly expanding Chinese legal profession provides an extraordinary opportunity for the U.S. legal profession to test U.S. assumptions about legal ethics. This essay examines challenges facing Chinese legal education and the Chinese legal profession as it develops norms of legal ethics. This essay examines this process from the law school and law student’s perspective about legal ethics, and then briefly explores the effort to create norms of attorney conduct from a top-down perspective. Both a bottom-up and top-down view show the tremendous challenges facing the emerging Chinese legal culture in building a coherent model of lawyering that can serve …


The Moral Responsibility Of The Corporate Lawyer, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Luke M. Scheuer Dec 2009

The Moral Responsibility Of The Corporate Lawyer, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Luke M. Scheuer

Judith A. McMorrow

Lawyers traditionally claim that they are not morally accountable for the goals or activities of their clients that are within the bounds of the law. This essay explores this concept of non-accountability in the context of corporate transactional representation. We argue that corporate lawyers, whose practice is forward looking, undertaken on behalf of corporate clients who have legally impaired ability to engage in independent moral reasoning, and who function in a world of relatively minimal legal oversight (i.e. whose work is furthest from the model of the adversary system) cannot persuasively claim that they are not morally responsible for the …


The (F)Utility Of Rules: Regulating Attorney Conduct In Federal Court Practice, Judith A. Mcmorrow Dec 2004

The (F)Utility Of Rules: Regulating Attorney Conduct In Federal Court Practice, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The problem is often decried: out-of-control attorneys, opportunists, cowboys, self-dealers, and overzealous prosecutors abusing the litigation process either for self-serving ends or from ideological zeal. But one person’s opportunist, cowboy, or self-dealer is another person’s zealous advocate. Lawyers want and need guidance on how to resolve issues that have competing claims to right behavior. The first place many lawyers look to find appropriate guidance are rules of ethics. Lawyers practicing in federal courts will find the search for rules particularly confusing. Unlike the Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure, federal courts do not operate with uniform ethics rules. District …


Judicial Attitudes Toward Confronting Attorney Misconduct: A View From The Reported Decisions, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Jackie Gardina, Salvatore Ricciardone Dec 2003

Judicial Attitudes Toward Confronting Attorney Misconduct: A View From The Reported Decisions, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Jackie Gardina, Salvatore Ricciardone

Judith A. McMorrow

Over the last 20 years, a rich body of literature has emerged to describe the increasingly complex system of lawyer regulation in the United States. This article studies the available data from the Code of Judicial Conduct and federal and state court opinions to glean a richer understanding of how judges construct their individual and institutional role in this web of attorney regulation. The picture that emerges from the reported decisions in both state and federal court is a desire to maintain the integrity of the judicial process and a concern for the efficiency and fairness in the proceeding before …