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Full-Text Articles in Law

Domestically Violent Attorneys: Resuscitating And Transforming A Dusty, Old Punitive Approach To Attorney Discipline Into A Viable Prescription For Rehabilitation, Ignascio G. Camarena Ii Sep 2010

Domestically Violent Attorneys: Resuscitating And Transforming A Dusty, Old Punitive Approach To Attorney Discipline Into A Viable Prescription For Rehabilitation, Ignascio G. Camarena Ii

Golden Gate University Law Review

This Comment will discuss (1) the prevalence of domestic violence in America, (2) the governmental responses to domestic violence, and (3) preserving the integrity of the legal profession. This Comment will then focus on how disciplinary courts have treated domestically violent attorneys. Part III examines the murky judicial approach to disciplining domestically violent attorneys, and Part IV criticizes that approach. Finally, Part V sets forth a proposal to cure the ill effects of the current approach, by injecting a greater degree of uniformity, ease, predictability and certainty into the disciplinary process.


Standing Committee On Discipline V. Yagman: The Ninth Circuit Provides Substantial First Amendment Protection For Attorney Criticism Of The Judiciary, Jeffrey A. White Sep 2010

Standing Committee On Discipline V. Yagman: The Ninth Circuit Provides Substantial First Amendment Protection For Attorney Criticism Of The Judiciary, Jeffrey A. White

Golden Gate University Law Review

In Standing Committee on Discipline of the United States District Court for the Central District of California v. Yagman, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an attorney who publicly criticized a federal judge did not commit sanctionable conduct. In determining whether the attorney, Stephen Yagman, had violated a local rule of professional conduct for lawyers, the court applied a "reasonable attorney" standard, rather than a subjective malice standard. The court held that Yagman's statements, in light of this higher standard, did not violate the rule's prohibition against impugning the integrity of the court. The Ninth Circuit also held …


Lawyers, Clients And Sex: Breaking The Silence On The Ethical And Liability Issues, Caroline Forell Sep 2010

Lawyers, Clients And Sex: Breaking The Silence On The Ethical And Liability Issues, Caroline Forell

Golden Gate University Law Review

This paper examines the existing case law concerning attorney-client sexual relationships and the current ethical rules which may be implicated. Because of the inadequacies in the present system, and the serious harm caused to both women clients and the Bar by these inadequacies, I propose changes in how lawyers regulate themselves and how others are compensated for lawyer's sexual misconduct.


It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert Sep 2010

It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert

Douglas L. Colbert

Professor Colbert challenges the popular view that regards lawyers as selfish, greedy and uncaring to the legal needs of the outside community. In his article, he recognizes that the lawyers with whom he is familiar are fulfilling the lawyer’s ethical obligation of engaging in pro bono service and “provid[ing] legal services to those unable to pay,” while also embracing the language in the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that refers to the attorney “as a public citizen who has a special responsibility to the quality of justice.” Professor Colbert asks colleagues in the legal academy whether they …


Toward A New Ethical Standard Regulating The Private Practice Of Former Government Lawyers, Barbara G. Mance Sep 2010

Toward A New Ethical Standard Regulating The Private Practice Of Former Government Lawyers, Barbara G. Mance

Golden Gate University Law Review

This comment advocates the elimination of the "appearance of impropriety" as a legal and ethical standard governing the disqualification of former government lawyers and urges the ABA to adopt Rule LIP of the proposed Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Model Rule 1.11, Successive Government and Private Employment, provides a comprehensible, precise ethical rule regulating the post-government practice of lawyers in conformity with federal statute and regulation.


Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith Apr 2010

Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith

Michigan Law Review

The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness" (p. 36), and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment" (p. 2). Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulat[e] a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue" (p. 2), one that …


It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert Mar 2010

It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Colbert challenges the popular view that regards lawyers as selfish, greedy and uncaring to the legal needs of the outside community. In his article, he recognizes that the lawyers with whom he is familiar are fulfilling the lawyer’s ethical obligation of engaging in pro bono service and “provid[ing] legal services to those unable to pay,” while also embracing the language in the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that refers to the attorney “as a public citizen who has a special responsibility to the quality of justice.” Professor Colbert asks colleagues in the legal academy whether they …


Foreword: The New Era- Quo Vadis?, John Sahl Jan 2010

Foreword: The New Era- Quo Vadis?, John Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

The Inaugural MBI Symposium’s twenty-six participants highlight many important developments and challenges caused by MJP and new technologies. Their assessments and suggestions provide a helpful roadmap for lawyers and regulators to negotiate the increasingly complex, fast-paced, and ethically risky landscape for delivering legal services. Several panelists suggested regulatory reforms that range from the creation of a regulatory framework for lawyers engaged in crossborder practice to the creation of standards for the supervision of offshore outsourced legal services268 and the mining of metadata. Some of the panelists’ suggestions and reforms are especially important given the “high [financial] stakes” involved in the …


An Introduction To The Financial Action Task Force And Its 2008 Lawyer Guidance, Laurel S. Terry Jan 2010

An Introduction To The Financial Action Task Force And Its 2008 Lawyer Guidance, Laurel S. Terry

Journal Articles

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is a thirty-eight-member intergovernmental organization whose mission is to fight money laundering and terrorism financing; the U.S. is a founding member of the FATF. The FATF is best known for its 40 Recommendations, many of which are directed towards various kinds of “gatekeepers” who are in a position to facilitate or inhibit money laundering and terrorism financing. (These were previously known as the 40+9 Recommendations). Lawyers are among those to whom the FATF’s recommendations apply. This article provides the introduction for the Journal of the Professional Lawyer’s Symposium about the application of the FATF …


Foreword: The New Era- Quo Vadis?, John Sahl Jan 2010

Foreword: The New Era- Quo Vadis?, John Sahl

John Sahl

The Inaugural MBI Symposium’s twenty-six participants highlight many important developments and challenges caused by MJP and new technologies. Their assessments and suggestions provide a helpful roadmap for lawyers and regulators to negotiate the increasingly complex, fast-paced, and ethically risky landscape for delivering legal services. Several panelists suggested regulatory reforms that range from the creation of a regulatory framework for lawyers engaged in crossborder practice to the creation of standards for the supervision of offshore outsourced legal services268 and the mining of metadata. Some of the panelists’ suggestions and reforms are especially important given the “high [financial] stakes” involved in the …


What's Love Got To Do With It?: Contemporary Lessons On Lawyerly Advocacy From The Preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., Deborah J. Cantrell Jan 2010

What's Love Got To Do With It?: Contemporary Lessons On Lawyerly Advocacy From The Preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

Lawyers have long been inspired by the advocacy work of Martin Luther King, Jr. From his work on the Montgomery bus boycott, to lunch counter sit-ins, to his March on Washington, Dr. King demonstrated skilled advocacy that resulted in important legal advancements. While lawyers give primacy to Dr. King as an advocate, Dr. King gave primacy to his work as a preacher. This article challenges the legal profession to consider the ways in which Dr. King, the preacher, may be as inspirational and instructive as Dr. King, the civil rights icon. Just as Dr. King's religious values were not abstracted …


Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On, David F. Levi Jan 2010

Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

In this tribute to Professor Robinson O. Everett, Dean David Levi questions the view that the citizen-lawyer or lawyer-statesmen models are in decline. Tracing Professor Everett’s varied career, accomplishments, and commitments to individuals and institutions; Levi contends that Everett combined the lawyer's traditional focus on the individual with an overall dedication to the larger community. Everett was not just a model citizen; he was a lawyer-citizen. Levi contends that the survival of the lawyer-citizen and lawyer-statesmen models is a matter of choice and character. Nothing in the current structure of the legal economy places these models out of reach for …


Mapping The World: Facts And Meaning In Adjudication And Mediation, Robert Rubinson Jan 2010

Mapping The World: Facts And Meaning In Adjudication And Mediation, Robert Rubinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores what is and what is not in adjudication and mediation, thus illuminating the profound differences between these two processes. The Article does this work in four parts. First, it offers an analysis of cognitive mapmaking and its inevitability in constructing meaning. It then explores how adjudication defines meaning in a particular way. This Article then conducts a comparable analysis of mediation. Finally, it focuses on the bridging function attorneys play between the worlds of mediation and adjudication.


How Must A Lawyer Be? A Response To Woolley And Wendel, David Luban Jan 2010

How Must A Lawyer Be? A Response To Woolley And Wendel, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Legal Ethics and Moral Character, 23 GEO. J. LEGAL Ethics, Alice Woolley and W. Bradley Wendel argue that theories of legal ethics may be evaluated by examining the kind of person a lawyer must be to conform to the normative demands of the theory. In their words, theories of legal ethics musts answer questions not only of what a lawyer must do, but how a lawyer must be. Woolley and Wendel examine three theories of legal ethics—those of Charles Fried, William Simon, and myself—and conclude that the theories they discuss impose demands on agency that are not realistic, functional, …


David Luban, Review Of Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy In A Democratic Age, David Luban Jan 2010

David Luban, Review Of Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy In A Democratic Age, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Daniel Markovits offers a novel defense of the traditional partisan advocate’s role, based on the demands of personal integrity. Although he insists that the adversary system requires lawyers to lie and cheat (regardless of the particular ethics rules in place), it is possible to redescribe these lawyerly vices as the virtue of fidelity to a client, expressed through what John Keats called “negative capability”—a suppression of the self in order to allow someone else’s story to shine forth. These are first-personal moral ideals, and Markovits argues against the primacy of second- and third-personal moral ideals (such as Kantianism and utilitarianism) …


Can Compassionate Practice Also Be Good Legal Practice?: Answers From The Lives Of Buddhist Lawyers, Deborah J. Cantrell Jan 2010

Can Compassionate Practice Also Be Good Legal Practice?: Answers From The Lives Of Buddhist Lawyers, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

What does it mean to say that one is a "good lawyer" in the United States? The dominant view is that a lawyer is a zealous advocate owing loyalty to, and taking direction from, the client. The lawyer is singularly focused and hyper-rationality is prized. This article challenges that narrative. Using the real lives of a group of lawyers across the United States, this article offers rich and nuanced descriptive data about the possibilities of "good lawyering" through compassion, equanimity, and an expanded notion of honesty. This article contributes importantly to the debate about what it means to be a …