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Alternative Spring Break 2016 Report, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Association For Public Interest Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Re-Designing Law And Lawyering For The Information Age, Thomas D. Barton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the intersection of three aspects of law, lawyering, and Information Age technology and culture, describing how they disrupt and inhibit one another even as they supply possible opportunities for each to grow and innovate. The Article urges that Information Age challenges to traditional legal institutions and thinking become the foundation for reforms to legal systems and individual lawyering. In embracing changes made possible by emerging technology, the Rule of Law may be strengthened globally and the Preventive/Proactive style of lawyering can be re-invigorated. The Article begins by describing the Preventive/Proactive lawyering ("PPL") style, and offers an example …

Representing Parents In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek Sankaran

Book Chapters

A parent's constitutional right to raise his or her child is one of the most venerated liberty interests safeguarded by the Constitution. The law presumes parents to be fit, and it establishes that they do not need to be model parents to retain custody of their children. If the state seeks to interfere with the parent-child relationship, the Constitution mandates: (I) that the state prove parental unfitness, a standard defined by state laws, and (2) that the state follow certain procedures protecting the due process rights of parents. The constitutional framework for child welfare cases is premised upon the belief …

Representing Children And Youth, Donald N. Duquette, Ann M. Haralambie

Book Chapters

The role of the child's attorney is unique in American jurisprudence and not yet clearly defined by law or tradition. There is an emerging consensus, however, that children in dependency cases should have lawyers and those lawyers should be as active and as involved in their cases as are lawyers for any other party in any other litigation. Although state law and policy makers differ as to what voice the child should have in determining the direction and goals of the litigation, that is, whether the child's lawyer should represent the best interests of the child as determined by the …

When It Comes To Lawyers, Is An Ounce Of Prevention Worth A Pound Of Cure, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

This 3-page blog post addresses the topic of proactive lawyer regulation, which is also known as proactive management-based regulation or PMBR. This blog post reviews Professor Susan Fortney's article entitled "Promoting Public Protection through an “Attorney Integrity” System: Lessons from the Australian Experience with Proactive Regulation System," and summarizes some of the impressive data that Professor Fortney collected in Australia, including her finding that sixty-two percent of the respondents reported that they agreed or strongly agreed with the following statement: the self-assessment process ‘was a learning exercise that enabled our firm to improve client service.’” The article also reports that …

The Power Of Lawyer Regulators To Increase Client & Public Protection Through Adoption Of A Proactive Regulation System, Laurel S. Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

This Article focuses on those who regulate U.S. laywers. The Article argues that the lawyers who head regulatory bodies in the United States have the ability to adjust the focus of the regulator for which they work in a way that will increase client and public protection. The Article further argues that it is appropriate for lawyers in these positions to exercise this power and that they should do so. The Article concludes by offering two concrete recommendations.

The first recommendation is that those who are in charge should, upon reflection, adopt a mindset in which they recognize that the …

Finishing The Job Of Legal Education Reform, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Beazley advocates for the extension of tenure to skills faculty for the good of law faculty and of legal education. She argues that extending tenure to legal writing and other skills faculty will help to advance the goals of education reform in a variety of ways. First, equalizing the power of skills faculty will allow law schools to get the full benefit of their teaching and scholarship, a benefit that is currently blunted by ignorance and bias. Second, fair treatment of skills faculty will advance the values of equality, diversity, and inclusion: law students will benefit …

Writing For A Mind At Work: Appellate Advocacy And The Science Of Digital Reading, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

Professor Beazley explores the future implications to appellate advocacy as we move into the digital age. Understanding how that digital world affects legal reading is vital to understanding the future of appellate advocacy. Lawyers need to understand some of the science of how people read and interact with the written word; unfortunately, we have been slow to grasp the importance of this science. She defines and explains the concepts of "Active Readers" and "Knowledge Work." She then addresses some of the issues that arise as active readers transition from paper to digital platforms. Professor Beazley concludes by describing some of …

Juking Access To Justice To Deregulate The Legal Market, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

Study after study has concluded that the United States suffers from a lack of access to justice because most legal issues are addressed without attorney involvement. To better serve Americans who cannot currently afford legal assistance, scholars have argued that corporations should be permitted to offer legal services. England and Australia already allow corporations to own law firms and deliver legal services.

Whatever the merits of corporate delivery of legal services, its impact on access to justice has been overstated. The cost of legal services plays a minor role in decisions to not obtain legal assistance. Moreover, many legal services …

The Power Of Lawyer Regulators To Increase Client & Public Protection Through Adoption Of A Proactive Regulation System, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

The idea behind this Article is Ben Franklin's statement that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This Article builds on the author's prior articles that argue that one can think about lawyer regulation issues as involving who-what-when-where-why-and-how to regulate issues. This Article addresses the issue of "WHEN" regulation should occur. It argues that regulators should be trying to PREVENT problems, as well as responding AFTER problems occur. This Article is primarily directed toward those who regulate U.S. lawyers. The Article argues that the lawyers who head regulatory bodies in the United States have the ability to …

Transnational Legal Practice, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

This 2015 Year-in-Review article continues the tradition of collecting and publicizing the developments that occurred during the year related to transnational legal practice (TLP). This year’s article builds on the work set forth in the 2014 Year-in-Review.

The 2014 TLP Year-in-Review provided a departure from the Year-in-Review’s typical method of presentation by identifying two categories of what that article called “TLP-Nets.” One group of TLP-Nets is nationally based and the other is inherently transnational. The 2014 article identified examples of TLP-Nets and highlighted the meeting points and relationships that facilitate border-crossing for the variety of actors involved in TLP policy-making …

Lawyers' Empire And The Great Transformation, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

Writing through the years of World War II and attempting to understand its horrors, the carnage of World War I, the great depression, and the rise of communist and fascist regimes, Karl Polanyi posited that Western Europe had undergone The Great Transformation through the nineteenth century. Built around policies of economic liberalism and the gospel of the self-regulating market, this transformation had produced a century of unparalleled peace and material wealth in Europe, but the unmooring of the market from other social forces, and the remaking of land and labour as commodities, would unleash, when the buttressing pillars faltered, the …

What Gideon Did, Sara Mayeux

All Faculty Scholarship

Many accounts of Gideon v. Wainwright’s legacy focus on what Gideon did not do—its doctrinal and practical limits. For constitutional theorists, Gideon imposed a preexisting national consensus upon a few “outlier” states, and therefore did not represent a dramatic doctrinal shift. For criminal procedure scholars, advocates, and journalists, Gideon has failed, in practice, to guarantee meaningful legal help for poor people charged with crimes.

Drawing on original historical research, this Article instead chronicles what Gideon did—the doctrinal and institutional changes it inspired between 1963 and the early 1970s. Gideon shifted the legal profession’s policy consensus on indigent defense away from …

Love, Anger, And Lawyering, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This essay explores how mindfulness practices helped one lawyer, now legal scholar, explore the roles of love and anger in lawyering.

Is Courtesy No Longer Contagious, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Wait, Wait, Don’T Tell Me: Accountability, Plausible Deniability, Model Rule 1.13, And The Role Of Corporate Counsel In An Age Of Enhanced Monitoring, Irma S. Russell

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Said I, But You Have No Choice: Why A Lawyer Must Ethically Honor A Client's Decision About Mental Health Treatment Even If It Is Not What S/He Would Have Chosen, Michael L. Perlin, Naomi Weinstein

Articles & Chapters

This paper addresses a remarkably under-considered topic: the ethical standards for lawyers representing persons with mental disabilities. Although there is an extensive body of literature endorsing “zealous advocacy” as the standard for the criminal defense lawyer in “ordinary” cases, there is virtually no literature (or case law) on this question in this context.

Our thesis is simple. We reject the model of “paternalism/best interests” that is regularly substituted for a traditional legal advocacy position, and a substitution that is rarely questioned. We believe this presumption flies in the face of statutory law, constitutional law, and international human rights law, and …

Law's Emotions, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The emerging interdisciplinary field of “Law and Emotions” brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law’s passions. They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the …

The Contested Value Of Normative Legal Scholarship, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal scholarship, under attack from critics both inside and outside the legal academy, is on the horns of a “normativity” dilemma. To some critics, legal scholarship isn’t scholarship, because it’s too normative; while to others, it may be scholarship, but it’s not legal because it’s not normative enough.

In this article, I address one side of this issue, what I call the anti-normativity complaint: to wit, that legal scholarship is somehow not “true scholarship” because so much of it is overtly normative. Legal scholarship, according to this strand of criticism, isn’t true scholarship because of the dominance of “ought” …

Creating Space For Silence In Law School Collaborations, A. Rachel Camp

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law school programs are increasingly expanding collaborative experiences for their students. In many clinical programs, collaboration -- through team pairings and group work – has been the norm, and gradually, collaborative work is being developed throughout the doctrinal law school curriculum. This trend fits within a broader societal emphasis on a collaborative model of working and learning. In both professional and educational settings, collaboration is viewed as critical to the success of ideas and products. Learning theory consistently identifies learning as being “inherently social” and best retained when engaged in with others. And, collaboration can substantially benefit the final work …

Rick's Taxonomy, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Essay uses the influential educational work Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for exploring how Rick Matasar’s scholarship relating to leadership in and the goals of legal education provides a guide for identifying, prioritizing and pursuing the core values and objectives of the legal education enterprise in a time of profound change. This Essay briefly describes Bloom’s Taxonomy and its status in the educational literature. Then it highlights two ways that Matasar’s leadership scholarship displays kinship to Bloom’s Taxonomy. His approach to describing a problem, analyzing its nature, and synthesizing and evaluating possible responses to the problem is …

Class Warfare: The Disappearance Of Low-Income Litigants From The Civil Docket, Myriam Gilles

Articles

In recent years, much attention has been paid to the startling disparities in income and wealth in contemporary U.S. society. The enormous concentration of economic power in the top 1% is the culmination of decades of significant income and wealth gains for the top, combined with stagnant or decreasing growth for the majority - a trend that continues apace. But nowhere is the gap more glaring than in the civil docket, where class actions brought by or on behalf of low-income consumers and employees are on the verge of disappearing.

To be sure, the decline in class actions is only …

Duties To Organizational Clients, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Loyalty to an organizational client means fidelity to the substantive legal structure that constitutes it. Although this principle is not controversial in the abstract, it is commonly ignored in professional discourse and doctrine. This article explains the basic notion of organizational loyalty and identifies some mistaken tendencies in discourse and doctrine, especially the "Managerialist Fallacy" that leads lawyers to conflate the client organization with its senior managers. The article then applies the basic notion to some hard cases, concluding with a critical appraisal of the rationale for confidentiality with organizational clients.

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

Articles

This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

The Changing Economic Geography Of Large U.S. Law Firms, William D. Henderson, Arthur S. Alderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The number of lawyers working for large U.S. law firms has increased dramatically. One important manifestation of this is the growing network of branch offices. Informed by three theories of spatial change—law firms (i) following the geographic expansion of their clients, relying on (ii) traditional agglomeration economies and relying on (iii) agglomeration benefits emerging from a location’s connectivity to other important geographies— we analyze longitudinal data on large U.S. law firms and the global urban network in which they are embedded. We find that, after the late 2000s, geographic expansion was less connected to organic market growth in U.S. domestic …

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases and …

The Role Of Language Interpretation In Providing A Quality Mediation Process, Alexandra Carter, Shawn Watts

Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on the role of language in mediation and the challenges multiple language fluencies bring to the practice. Beginning with a discussion of the process and ethics of mediation as a form of alternative dispute resolution, as distinct from other forms of dispute resolution including arbitration, the paper shifts to consider the importance of language. Language, and more specifically interpretation, plays a central role in the integrity of the mediation process and the quality of its outcomes. Each stage of mediation requires the participants and the mediator understand one another to ensure effective communication and a quality process. …