Law Commons^™

The End Of Asylum Redux And The Role Of Law School Clinics, Elora Mukherjee

Faculty Scholarship

The Biden Administration has perpetuated many of the prior administration’s hostile policies undermining access to asylum at the southern border. This Essay first examines these policies and then identifies emerging opportunities for law school clinics to address these new challenges, including by serving asylum seekers south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Evaluating Legal Needs, Luz Herrera, Amber Baylor, Nandita Chaudhuri, Felipe Hinojosa

Faculty Scholarship

This article is the first to explore legal needs in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas – a region that is predominantly Latinx and has both rural and urban characteristics. There are few legal needs assessments of majority Latinx communities, and none that examine needs in areas that are also U.S. border communities. Access to justice studies often overlook this area of the U.S. and this segment of the population despite their unique qualities. Latinos are projected to constitute the largest ethnic group in the country by 2060, making it imperative that we study access to justice-related assets, needs, opportunities, …

Innovation In A Time Of Uncertainty: Lawyer-Leadership At Davis Polk And Wardwell Llp, Davis Polk Leadership Initiative

Davis Polk Leadership Initiative

In Fall 2009, Gabe Rosenberg was a first-year associate at Davis Polk and Wardwell LLP. Equipped with a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a newly-minted law degree, Rosenberg joined the Financial Institutions Group at a time when the firm and its clients were working hard to make sense of a rapidly changing regulatory environment following the 2008 financial crisis. It was this evolving regulatory complexity the firm and its clients faced that presented an opportunity for Gabe and one of the senior partners with which he worked, Meg Tahyar, to exercise lawyer-leadership.

Eroding "Checks" On Presidential Authority – Norms, The Civil Service, And The Courts, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Susan Rose-Ackerman's "Executive Rulemaking and Democratic Legitimacy: 'Reform' in the United States and the United Kingdom's Route to Brexit" insightfully illuminates important differences between parliamentary and presidential systems of government in relation to executive bodies' production of the large volume of secondary legislation common, indeed inevitable, for both. Agreeing heartily with her conclusion that the weakness of parliamentary engagement with secondary legislation, and limited judicial review of its production, counsels greater provision for public participation and transparency of action at the agency level, there is little for me to add. Aware, too, as she remarks, that others have dealt more …

Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …

The State's Role In The Regulation And Provision Of Legal Services In South Africa And The United States: Supporting, Nudging Or Interfering?, Helen Kruuse, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

An independent legal profession is said to be “the bulwark of a free and democratic society.” It is also said that a high measure of independence of mind and action by legal actors is necessary for the maintenance of the rule of law. However, too often, there is the allegation (within the sociological literature in particular) that the legal profession has used the concepts of independence and the rule of law as a shield or cuirass rather than as a sword. The image of lawyers representing unpopular clients fearlessly and advocating on behalf of unpopular causes, so as to uphold …

Unmarked? Criminal Record Clearing And Employment Outcomes, Jeffrey Selbin, Justin Mccrary, Joshua Epstein

Faculty Scholarship

An estimated one in three American adults has a criminal record. While some records are for serious offenses, most are for arrests or relatively low-level misdemeanors. In an era of heightened security concerns, easily available data, and increased criminal background checks, these records act as a substantial barrier to gainful employment and other opportunities. Harvard sociologist Devah Pager describes people with criminal records as “marked” with a negative job credential.

In response to this problem, lawyers have launched unmarking programs to help people take advantage of legal record clearing remedies. We studied a random sample of participants in one such …

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 …

A Response To The Video, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Let me preface my remarks by informing you that I am not a lawyer. That means that there are things I don't get and things that I'll say that you may not grasp immediately, because there are certain assumptions we don't share. To illustrate that, let me just tell you, I don't even get lawyer jokes.

For example, when I saw the movie So Goes A Nation, and Sam Sue says, "Law schools teach basic skills," I didn't realize that was a joke until you all laughed at it. So there are many subtleties of this sort that escape me. …

Rediscovering Client Decisionmaking: The Impact Of Role-Playing, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

There are more things of importance to representing clients than are disclosed through a typical interview or counseling session, even a session undertaken by a lawyer earnestly attempting to hear rather than ignore the client. We lawyers are often vividly aware, when we pause to contemplate the point, that we do not know all we should about our clients. We may also believe that we have great gulfs of knowledge and experience to cross in order to hear and understand any particular client. Further, we fear that our ability to cross these gulfs is limited by the human, and lawyerly, …

The Devolution Of The Legal Profession: A Demand Side Perspective, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analysis has not played a significant role in the increasingly intense debate over the decline of professionalism among lawyers.Economists' lack of interest in the issue may be understandable. The lawyers' lament is that the legal profession is devolving into the business of law. That this concern has not captured the economists' attention may reflect only that economists do not view the label "business" as a pejorative. If becoming a business means efficiently rendering an important service in a competitive environment, then of what is there to complain?

Lawyers, more directly concerned with maintaining their professional status, would find little …

Sharing Among The Human Capitalists: An Economic Inquiry Into The Corporate Law Firm And How Partners Split Profits, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Large corporate law firms seem to be in a state of extraordinary flux. Success and failure are both on the rise. Large firms appear to supply a substantial and growing proportion of the legal services consumed by American business enterprises and to hire a significant fraction of the graduating classes of elite American law schools. Moreover, the last twenty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in both the number of large firms and the absolute size of the biggest. But accompanying this striking success, there are also signs of serious institutional instability. During the last few years, several previously successful …