Law Commons^™

Covid-19'S Impact On Families, Lawyers, And Courts: An Annotated Bibliography, Allen K. Rostron

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Strategies And Techniques For Integrating Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Into The Core Law Curriculum : Comprehensive Guide To Dei Pedagogy, Course Planning, And Classroom Practice, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

AALL Legal Website of the Month

Professor Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law has authored a book about the strategies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into classrooms. The focus of this publication is on learning outcomes and assessments, and course planning templates for each course in the core law curriculum, and racial trauma-informed teaching approaches. Each chapter also includes FAQs and discussion questions to work through for the course planning and DEI curricular initiatives to transform the way we think, teach, learn and act such that all experiences and ways of being are handled with fairness and justice.

The Overreach Of Limits On 'Legal Advice', Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower, more explicit definition of legal advice that advances, rather than undercuts, access to justice.

Aba Employment Summary Class Of 2022, University Of Tennessee College Of Law

ABA Disclosures

No abstract provided.

Exploring Race And Racism In The Law School Curriculum: An Administrator's View On Adopting An Antiracist Curriculum, Amy Gaudion

Faculty Scholarly Works

This article provides a candid assessment of the demanding, and rewarding, work that is required to put into action the written words of institutional support for implementing an Antiracist curriculum. This article starts by describing the two Penn State Dickinson Law faculty resolutions that committed the faculty to condemn racism and bias against our Black and Brown brothers and sisters, while committing to teach and learn according to Antiracist pedagogy and best practices. It then describes the resolve to become Antiracist teachers, discusses the investments in curricular policy and reform, and details the bureaucratic processes to accomplish the following: adding …

Lessons From Psychology For Law Practice Management, Peter Glenn

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Cross-Cultural Communication In A Crisis: The Universality Of Visual Narrative In The Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A primary goal of twenty-first century legal works is to communicate the law effectively to diverse audiences. Many of the most needful and most vulnerable audiences for legal information have members who lack basic literacy skills and suffer linguistic and cultural confusion from verbal textual media—namely, the printed word. Yet for centuries, legal rules and government restrictions have been communicated nearly exclusively through the printed word. Recent scholarship in visual legal rhetoric, visual literacy studies, and visual cultural studies is informed by cognitive psychology and neuroscience that all points to a solution: visual communication of the law. Visual communication is …

Ready Lawyer One: Lawyering In The Metaverse, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Lawyers Justice Corps: A Licensing Pathway To Enhance Access To Justice, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

The idea for establishing a Lawyers Justice Corps emerged out of efforts to solve a problem: how to license lawyers at a time when COVID-19 had expanded the need for new lawyers while also making an in-person bar exam dangerous, if not impossible. We-the Collaboratory on Legal Education and Licensing for Practice'-proposed the Lawyers Justice Corps to provide a different and better way of certifying minimum competence for new attorneys while at the same time helping to create a new generation of lawyers equipped to address a wide range of social justice, racial justice, and criminal justice issues. When implemented, …

Reflections On A Crit Clinic, Elizabeth L. Macdowell, Nina L. Terzian

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of Shaping The Bar: The Future Of Attorney Licensing, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

In Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, Professor Joan Howarth issues a clarion call to the academy, the legal community, and the judiciary to reform the way we license lawyers in the United States. In this book Howarth identifies the current crisis in law licensing, the history of racism that created this crisis, and the tools available to address it. Shaping the Bar challenges our entrenched notions of professional identity, and it forces us to confront vulnerabilities in attorney self-regulation. It does so in a manner that will stir even those not immersed in the current debate about …

Don't Let The Digital Tail Wag The Transformation Dog: A Digital Transformation Roadmap For Corporate Counsel, Michele M. Destefano, Tellmann P. Bjarne, Daniel Wu

Articles

Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enhancements in technology, as well as shifts in the macroeconomic and socioeconomic dynamics of globalization, Digital Transformation (DT) has become an enterprise-wide imperative for most multinational companies (MNCs). As a result, legal departments are being challenged to embrace enterprise DT and start their own departmental DT journeys. Despite these trends, there is little scholarship and research about how MNC legal departments are addressing the DT challenge. How are General Counsel (GCs) currently approaching DT? Is what they are doing effective and value-accretive? And importantly, how should GCs approach DT to best generate value? …

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

Articles

In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

Lawyering 'Twisties': Naming And Untangling Performance Anxiety, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

A Tribute To The Scholarship Of Professor Dale Oesterle, Jeffrey J. Haas

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And The Lies They Tell, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

Noting that the First Amendment protects lies about the government made in the public square, this article explores whether lawyers’ free speech rights ought to be different from that of other speakers. The law holds lawyers to a more demanding standard of conduct than others when it comes to aspects of lawyers’ fiduciary relationships with courts and clients. But how much more demanding can the law be when it comes to lawyers’ speech — in this case, false political speech? Applying the current First Amendment framework, we question the bar’s assumption that lawyers’ speech outside of these contexts can be …

Introduction: Celebrating The Mound City Bar Association Centennial: Looking Back, Leading Forward, Karen L. Tokarz, David Thomas Konig, Hon. David C. Mason

Scholarship@WashULaw

In 2022, the Mound City Bar Association in St. Louis, one of the first Black bar associations in the country, celebrates its 100th anniversary. In this volume of the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, distinguished authors look back at a century of contributions of Mound City Bar Association lawyers, judges, and allies, documenting their efforts to eliminate racial discrimination and break down barriers to equal justice. The volume is a testament to the work of countless individuals in the fight for civil rights since the beginning of the association in 1922. The authors also anticipate and examine the …

A Study Of Tax Lawyers Discussing Duties, Michelle M. Kwon, Michael Hatfield

Scholarly Works

This Article reports the first qualitative empirical study of U.S. tax lawyers. We interviewed women lawyers who were tax planning specialists. Though this is the first such study of U.S. tax lawyers, this methodology has been used often to study the professional ethics of other tax practitioners around the world. We had three research questions that we sought to answer through dynamic conversations on topics such as the distinctions between good and bad tax plans and good and bad tax lawyers and also the joys and stresses of tax practice. Our first research question was as to the make-up of …

Put Down The Phone! The Standard For Witness Interviews Is In-Person, Face-To-Face, One-On-One, Sean O'Brien, Quinn O'Brien, Dana Cook

Faculty Works

Professor and capital defense attorney Sean O’Brien, private investigator Quinn O’Brien, and mitigation specialist Dana Cook team up in this article to explain why the standard for competent defense investigation requires face-to-face, one-on-one, culturally competent client and witness interviews, and why short cuts to investigation, such as telephone calls or remote video links, are counter-productive, prone to failure, and constitute substandard work. Although the primary focus of this article is on standards that apply to capital mitigation work, the problems created by remote witness interviews are not unique to death penalty work; there are persuasive arguments and authority that the …

Changemakers Master Of Studies In Law: Adding Depth: Katie Mulvaney, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Legal Ethics For Government Lawyers: Confronting Doctrinal Gaps, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite the recent growth in the Canadian literature on legal ethics for government lawyers, the leading conceptual models have yet to be applied to resolve many of the most important legal questions facing government lawyers. In this article, I identify four key situations where the obligations of government lawyers as lawyers appear to clash with their obligations as public servants. I provide both a doctrinal analysis of how the current law applies in those situations and proposals for how the law can be clarified and improved. This analysis both provides much needed guidance to government lawyers and promotes a greater …

The Appearance Of Appearances, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

The Framers argued judicial independence was necessary to the success of the American democratic experiment. Independence required judges possess and act with integrity. One aspect of judicial integrity was impartiality. Impartial judging was believed crucial to public confidence that the decisions issued by American courts followed the rule of law. Public confidence in judicial decision making promoted faith and belief in an independent judiciary. The greater the belief in the independent judiciary, the greater the chance of continued success of the republic.

During the nineteenth century, state constitutions, courts, and legislatures slowly expanded the instances in which a judge was …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

“A Force Created”: The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce And The Politics Of Corporate Immunity, Myriam E. Gilles

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Judging Without A J.D., Sara Sternberg Greene, Kristen M. Renberg

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most basic assumptions of our legal system is that when two parties face off in court, the case will be adjudicated before a judge who is trained in the law. This Essay begins by showing that, empirically, the assumption that most judges have legal training does not hold true for many low-level state courts. Using data we compiled from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, we find that thirty-two states allow at least some low-level state court judges to adjudicate without a law degree, and seventeen states do not require judges who adjudicate eviction cases …

Toward More Robust Self-Regulation Within The Legal Profession, Veronica Root Martinez, Caitlin-Jean Juricic

Faculty Scholarship

The Trump Administration left reverberations throughout American life, and the legal profession was not insulated from its impact. The conduct of lawyers—both public and private—working on behalf of former President Trump was the subject of constant conversation and critique. The reality, however, is that the questions regarding the conduct of the Trump Administration lawyers, are rooted, in part, in more fundamental questions about the appropriate role of the lawyer within society. This Essay advocates for the adoption of a self-regulation scheme whereby lawyers regulate and oversee the conduct of other lawyers, to ensure that members of the legal profession are …

Courts Apply A Case-By-Case Analysis In Distinguishing A Meritorious Motion To Disqualify From A Delaying Litigation Tactic, Cathrena Collins

Bankruptcy Research Library

(Excerpt)

It is becoming increasingly rare for an attorney to remain at the same firm for an entire career. Lateral movements of lawyers coupled with large firms employing hundreds of attorneys creates ample opportunity for conflicts of interest to arise. The American Bar Association explains a conflict of interest is present when "there is a significant risk that a lawyer's ability to consider, recommend or carry out an appropriate course of action for the client will be materially limited as a result of the other lawyer's responsibilities or interest." Furthermore, Rule 1.10(b) dictates that a lawyer joining a new firm …

The Ties That Bind: The Relationship Between Law Firm Growth And Law Firm Survival, Alan J. Kluegel

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

For the better part of the twentieth century, law firms hired, trained, and grew through a stable and predictable pattern: hire new law school graduates, monitor and evaluate their work, and pick promising attorneys from among their ranks and elevate them to partner. Rinse, lather, repeat. A combination of professional norms and organizational inertia made this approach the dominant method of growth among large corporate law firms until changes in legal market broke down these customary practices, ushering in a new era of lawyer mobility. Now, it has become commonplace for lawyers to leave for greener pastures as more law …

The Rules Of Professional Responsibility And Legal Finance: A Status Update, Anthony J. Sebok

Faculty Articles

Legal finance occurs when strangers fund litigation for profit. Traditionally looked upon with suspicion in the common law, and limited by the doctrines of champerty and maintenance, legal finance is now a thriving part of the American legal landscape. Legal finance has been promoted as a solution to the access-to-justice problems facing working and middle class Americans, as well as a new asset class for Wall Street. At the center of legal finance, however, are lawyers – not the lawyers who write the contracts for the financing – but the lawyers for the cases being financed.

Over the past decade, …