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Full-Text Articles in Law
Virtuous Billing, Randy D. Gordon, Nancy B. Rapoport
Virtuous Billing, Randy D. Gordon, Nancy B. Rapoport
Faculty Scholarship
Aristotle tells us, in his Nicomachean Ethics, that we become ethical by building good habits and we become unethical by building bad habits: “excellence of character results from habit, whence it has acquired its name (êthikê) by a slight modification of the word ethos (habit).” Excellence of character comes from following the right habits. Thinking of ethics as habit-forming may sound unusual to the modern mind, but not to Aristotle or the medieval thinkers who grew up in his long shadow. “Habit” in Greek is “ethos,” from which we get our modern word, “ethical.” In Latin, habits are moralis, which …
Promoting Public Protection Through An “Attorney Integrity” System: Lessons From The Australian Experience With Proactive Regulation Of Lawyers, Susan Saab Fortney
Promoting Public Protection Through An “Attorney Integrity” System: Lessons From The Australian Experience With Proactive Regulation Of Lawyers, Susan Saab Fortney
Faculty Scholarship
This essay uses the Australian proactive approach to regulating attorneys as a springboard to discussing the role of proactive regulation of lawyers in advancing public protection. The essay provides information on the genesis and implementation of “proactive management-based regulation, the system in Australia. The essay reviews key research findings from empirical studies on the impact of the new system on complaints registered against lawyers and the conduct of lawyers in firms. The essay suggests possibilities for using management-based principles to improve lawyer regulation and conduct in the United States and other jurisdictions. The author concludes with a challenge for regulators …
High Court Pretense, Lower Court Candor: Judicial Impartiality After Capterton V. Massey Coal Co., Lynne H. Rambo
High Court Pretense, Lower Court Candor: Judicial Impartiality After Capterton V. Massey Coal Co., Lynne H. Rambo
Faculty Scholarship
Apolitical, impartial judging has always been our judicial ideal. In the last twenty years, however, special interest groups have sought power over (and through) judges by pouring millions into judicial elections, and the Court has recognized their first amendment right to do so. In the midst of this politicization of judicial elections, the Court five years ago reinforced the impartiality ideal, holding very broadly in Caperton v. Massey Coal Co. that it violates due process for a judge to sit whenever there is a “probability of bias,” i.e., whenever the average judge is unlikely to be neutral. Caperton involved a …
Arbitrator Bias, William W. Park
Arbitrator Bias, William W. Park
Faculty Scholarship
Seeking to bring arbitration into disrepute, an evil gremlin might contemplate two starkly different routes. One route would tolerate appointment of pernicious arbitrators, biased and unable to judge independently. An alternate route to shipwreck, also reducing confidence in the integrity of the arbitral process, would establish unrealistic ethical standards that render the arbitrator’s position precarious and susceptible to destabilisation by litigants engaged in dilatory tactics or seeking to annul unfavourable awards. To reduce the risk of having cases decided by either pernicious or precarious arbitrators, those who establish and apply ethical guidelines walk a tightrope between the rival poles of …