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Full-Text Articles in Law
An Honest But Fearless Fighter: The Adversarial Ideal Of Public Defenders In 1930s And ’40s Los Angeles, Sara Mayeux
An Honest But Fearless Fighter: The Adversarial Ideal Of Public Defenders In 1930s And ’40s Los Angeles, Sara Mayeux
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Vercoe's self-description as a courtroom "fighter" illuminates public defenders' professional identity in the United States in the decades after the criminal courts had developed into a modem bureaucracy, but before the Warren Court constitutionalized criminal procedure. Historians have characterized lawyering for the poor as outside the mainstream of adversar- ial legal culture, describing a "two-tiered legal system" in which lawyers celebrated courtroom combat on behalf of paying clients but relegated the indigent to a lesser form of advocacy that valorized "compromise." Comporting with this characterization, legal scholars have portrayed early public defenders as "assembly-line" workers who conducted little factual investigation …
Isonomy, Austerity, And The Right To Choose Counsel, Janet Moore
Isonomy, Austerity, And The Right To Choose Counsel, Janet Moore
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
People who can afford to hire criminal defense attorneys have a Sixth Amendment right to choose a lawyer who is qualified, available, and free from conflicts of interest. The same right to choose counsel is routinely denied to people who need government-paid defense lawyers because they cannot afford to hire attorneys. In prior work, I invoked democratic theory to argue that this de jure discrimination blocks constitutional law formation by poor people and should be eliminated. This Article extends the analysis by explaining how a different theoretical approach—one grounded in libertarian commitments to private enterprise and austerity in public funding—shaped …