Law Commons^™

Disappearing Dilemmas: Judicial Construction Of Ethical Choice As Strategic Behavior In The Criminal Defense Context, Manuel Berrélez, Jamal Greene, Bryan Leach

Faculty Scholarship

Imagine the following scenario: A criminal defense attorney represents a man accused of kidnapping and murdering two children in a residential neighborhood. During the course of interviewing key witnesses, the defense attorney becomes convinced that her client was present at the scene of the murder. While her client denies having been present, his alibi changes entirely from one interview to the next. The two main witnesses that the client offers to Corroborate his most recent alibi recant, suggesting to the defense attorney that both they and the defendant were actually present at the scene of the crime. Third parties confirm …

Comment On Moliterno, Legal Education, Experiential Education, And Professional Responsibility, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In attempting to predict and prescribe the future, my vision of the recent history of legal education differs from Professor Moliterno's in certain relevant ways.

I graduated from Law School in 1967. I learned largely through doctrinal courses that delivered steady training in thinking like a lawyer and information about areas of law. These courses exposed me and my classmates to legal lingo and to the standard types of legal arguments. We learned, largely by hearing the teacher and our fellow students, to make verbal moves and to see the strengths and limitations of others' argumentation skills and techniques. We …

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …

The Lawyer As Informer, Gerard E. Lynch

Faculty Scholarship

From the schoolyard "tattletale" to the police officer's "confidential informant" to the Pentagon "whistle blower," our society is deeply ambivalent toward those who report the wrongdoing of others to the authorities. On the one hand, society values informers. Without informers, serious misbehavior would certainly escape correction. The police officers' code of silence with respect to fellow officers' crimes, for example, may be a major obstacle to eliminating police corruption and brutality. On the other hand, society scorns informers as betrayers of confidence. Even one who violates an antisocial pact such as the police officers' code of silence is viewed as …