Law Commons^™

Ethical Ai In American Policing, Elizabeth E. Joh

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

We know there are problems in the use of artificial intelligence in policing, but we don’t quite know what to do about them. One can also find many reports and white papers today offering principles for the responsible use of AI systems by the government, civil society organizations, and the private sector. Yet, largely missing from the current debate in the United States is a shared framework for thinking about the ethical and responsible use of AI that is specific to policing. There are many AI policy guidance documents now, but their value to the police is limited. Simply repeating …

Legislative Actions To Promote And Enforce Ethical Conduct In Government, Christine Todd Whitman

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence And The Problem Of Autonomy, Simon Chesterman

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are routinely said to operate autonomously, exposing gaps in regulatory regimes that assume the centrality of human actors. Yet surprisingly little attention is given to precisely what is meant by “autonomy” and its relationship to those gaps. Driverless vehicles and autonomous weapon systems are the most widely studied examples, but related issues arise in algorithms that allocate resources or determine eligibility for programs in the private or public sector. This article develops a novel typology of autonomy that distinguishes three discrete regulatory challenges posed by AI systems: the practical difficulties of managing risk associated with new …

Avoiding Judicial Discipline, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

Over the past several years, several high-profile complaints have been levied against Article III judges alleging improper conduct. Many of these complaints, however, were dismissed without investigation after the judge in question removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the circuit’s judicial council—oftentimes through retirement and once through elevation to the Supreme Court. When judges—the literal arbiters of justice within American society—are able to elude oversight of their own potential misconduct, it puts the legitimacy of the judiciary and rule of law in jeopardy.

This Essay argues that it is imperative that mechanisms are adopted that will ensure investigations into judicial …

The Professor As Institutional Entrepreneur, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Law professors are all about ideas, and the creation of an institute, clinic, or center within a law school is the instantiation of an idea. Ideas embodied in law school institutions become crystallized in the fabric of a school, changing its culture, internalizing its values, and reflecting its priorities. Robert Cochran has helped to establish multiple institutes, centers, and clinics at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and in so doing he has become the law school's great serial entrepreneur. The institutes Cochran helped to establish have become laboratories to give expression to his ideas about the relationship between faith, ethics, and …

Dead Or Alive? The Law, Policy, And Market Effects Of Legislation On Unclaimed Life Insurance Benefits, James M. Carson, Robert E. Hoyt, Tim R. Samples

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

A wave of multi-state audits on the insurance industry’s use of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File (DMF) stirred national controversy over the status of unclaimed life insurance proceeds. Multi-state investigations uncovered “asymmetric” use of the DMF among many large insurance companies. Accusations of unethical behavior led to numerous settlement agreements between state regulators and insurers. Payouts and fines stemming from these settlements already number in the billions of dollars. Legislative responses are also underway. Some states have adopted—and others are considering—legislation requiring life insurers to search the DMF to identify and pay (or eascheat) unclaimed death benefits. Currently, …

Coordinating Compliance Incentives, Veronica Root

Journal Articles

In today’s regulatory environment, a corporation engaged in wrongdoing can be sure of one thing: regulators will point to an ineffective compliance program as a key cause of institutional misconduct. The explosion in the importance of compliance is unsurprising given the emphasis that governmental actors — from the Department of Justice, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, to even the Commerce Department — place on the need for institutions to adopt “effective compliance programs.” The governmental actors that demand effective compliance programs, however, have narrow scopes of authority. DOJ Fraud handles violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, while the …

Modern-Day Monitorships, Veronica Root

Journal Articles

When a sexual abuse scandal rocked Penn State, when Apple engaged in anticompetitive behavior, and when servicers like Bank of America improperly foreclosed upon hundreds of thousands of homeowners, each organization entered into a Modern-Day Monitorship. Modern-Day Monitorships are utilized in an array of contexts to assist in widely varying remediation efforts. They provide outsiders a unique source of information about the efficacy of the tarnished organization’s efforts to remediate misconduct. Yet despite their use in high-profile and serious matters of organizational wrongdoing, they are not an outgrowth of careful study and deliberate planning. Instead, Modern-Day Monitorships have been employed …

The People's Nih? Ethical And Legal Concerns In Crowdfunded Biomedical Research, Joshua E. Perry

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

Over the last decade, online crowdfunding has become a mainstream source of capital formation for a range of artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors. Low-barrier websites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo that fund production of a movie or recording of an album, in addition to charity conduits such as Kiva that facilitate the dissemination of microloans in the developing world, are trusted fundraising mechanisms that offer alternatives to traditional financing through banks and venture capitalists. Moreover, these models predicated on the solicitation of relatively modest amounts of money create a more egalitarian investment environment wherein donors can join the effort—and often receive …

Carter Snead Lecture "Physician Assisted Suicide: Objections In Principle And In Prudence", O. Carter Snead

Faculty Lectures and Presentations

Professor Carter Snead delivered a lecture “The Law, Ethics and Public Policy of Assisted Suicide: Arguments in Principle and Prudence” and a panelist at Fostering Better Relationships Between Doctors and Lawyers: Practical Case Panels to the full pediatric medical staff (physicians and residents) at the monthly Pediatric Grand Rounds of the Medical University of South Carolina (located in Charleston, S.C.) September 25.

Reason, Revelation, Universality And Particularity In Ethics, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This address to a philosophical conference on truth and faith in ethics engages in an extended critique of the account of truth in Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy (Princeton University Press, 2002). For any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue. But any such theory also needs to make clear how it differs from, even when it coincides in moral judgment with, bodies of moral teaching self-identified as part of …

Business Lawyers, Baseball Players, And The Hebrew Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This article is a reflection on the ethics of practiving law for business, building on the career of Scott Boras, who acts as agent and lawyer for professional baseball players. The reflection wonders at the clout corporate lawyers have over their clients, mentioning, of course, some personal experiences (back before the invention of moveable type) from the author's two years in a large business-oriented law firm, as well as on Mr. Boras's significant influence in the baseball world. The object, finally, is ethical reflection on such things as the particular a lawyer has when she in in house rather than …

Rights And The Need For Objective Moral Limits, Charles E. Rice

Journal Articles

In this article, we will examine the natural law conception that rights are rooted in human nature, which nature itself is of divine origin through creation. We will compare this natural law concept to the premises and social consequences of the secular, relativist, and individualist approaches common to the jurisprudence of the Enlightenment. This article will offer the conclusion that only a grounding of right in the nature of persons as immortal beings created by God can offer moral and cultural security against the depersonalization characteristic of regimes premised on a relativist individualism.

Symposium: Client Counseling And Moral Responsibility, Thomas L. Shaffer, Deborah L. Rhode, Paul R. Tremblay, Robert F. Cochran

Journal Articles

One of the most important challenges to lawyers and clients is addressing issues that are not controlled by law. Will the client take steps (legal steps) that will harm other people? Will the officers of a corporation consider the effects of its actions on workers, on consumers, on the community, on the environment? In a divorce, will the client take actions that will harm a child or spouse? What role should the lawyer play regarding these questions? The way lawyers address such issues may do more to determine whether their practice is socially useful or socially harmful than any rule …

Lawyers And Biblical Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This is part of a broader exploration of the suggestion that the biblical prophets-Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Nathan, and the others-are sources of ethical reflection and moral example for modern American lawyers. The suggestion appears to be unusual; I am not sure why.

The Prophets were, more than anything else, lawyers-as their successors, the Rabbis of the Talmud, were. They were neither teachers nor bureaucrats, not elected officials or priests or preachers. And the comparison is not an ancient curiosity:

Much of what admirable lawyer-heroes have done in modern America has been prophetic in the biblical sense-that is, what they …

American Legal Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The ethics of American lawyers come from the English gentleman-lawyer of the nineteenth century, with the steady addition of an elitist Jeffersonian gloss. But they have, within the last century, been seperated, so that reulation claims to operate without conscience. The result is that the law of lawyers is now the principal, if not only, feature of the official codes, and ethics as ethics is is spread oer insignificant consensus statements by bar associations and promising scholarship from academic lawyers, some small part of which deserves to be called ethics and even, from small beginnings to be called religious ethics.

Love, Human Dignity, And Justice: Some Legacies From Protestant And Catholic Ethics, Harlan R. Beckley

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Proposal For Reconciling The Free Speech Clause With Curricular Values Inculcation In The Public Schools, Susan H. Bitensky

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.

Towering Figures, Enigmas, And Responsive Communities In American Legal Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The first thing Niebuhr and Guttman are telling us to do is to look around and figure out what is going on around us. With that in mind, it has seemed to me that, at the simplest, a lawyer (or a journalist) functions in at least four communities, any one of which might be a community to talk about lawyers' moral questions in.

My inquiry, then, is an inquiry in communitarian legal ethics, using a Guttman-Niebuhr focus on responsibility. I infer a further question about communities of moral discernment—that is, not only where a modern lawyer is responsible but also …

Why Informed Consent? Human Experimentation And The Ethics Of Autonomy, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Not long ago, the welfare reform debate took a provocative turn. New Jersey welfare recipients challenged the state's Family Cap rule, which denied additional cash aid to parents who conceive children while on welfare. Welfare rights activists argued that the rule "with[held] benefits to see if [this would] alter human behavior." They insisted that the innovative, but stern, Family Cap rules were effectively experiments on welfare recipients without their consent.

This is a powerful argument. After all, consent enjoys talismanic—if not sacramental—status in modem life and thought; it is our "master concept." But why? Why should consenting mean so much …

Narrative In The Moral Theology Of Tom Shaffer, John D. Ayer

1971–1975: Thomas L. Shaffer

Essay Review

Thomas L. Shaffer, American Legal Ethics: Text, Readings, and Discussion Topics. New York: Matthew Bender, 1985. Pp. xxix + 645 + 92 apps. $32.50.

-----------, Faith and the Professions. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 337. $29.50.

I. Character Ethics

II. Shaffer's Project

III. Storytelling

IV. Community

V. Grades

The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Ethics, David T. Link

Journal Articles

The law school curriculum at Notre Dame is based on a two-faceted mission statement that the faculty developed in 1974. Moral values are central to both facets: (1) to be an outstanding teaching school that prepares competent and compassionate attorneys whose decisions are guided by the values and morality that Notre Dame represents; (2) to promote leading contributions to the development of the law, the system of justice, the legal profession, and legal education, through faculty scholarship and institutional projects that embody important qualities of the Notre Dame value system. We intend to dedicate as much intensity to sensitizing our …

Should A Christian Lawyer Serve The Guilty?, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

People who teach or practice law are in some ways like public executioners or the Air Force officers who watch over the buttons that will send nuclear missiles into action: Other people, ordinary people, want to know what we do to overcome what seem to ordinary people to be moral obstacles to doing what we do.

What ordinary people say to lawyers, and what my students say when they first come to law school, when they are still more ordinary people than they are law students, is this: How can lawyers lend their skills and talents to the representation of …

Less Suffering When You're Warned: A Response To Professor Lewis, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Professor Lewis' comment is a lucid brief for warning clients that their lawyers have moral limits. It begins with a generous description of the discussion Professor Freedman and I had on the subject of moral limits. I am able, as a result, to summarize the exchanges quickly: Professor Freedman's original proposition, in these pages, was that once the lawyer-client relationship is in place, it is immoral for the lawyer to refuse to seek the client's legal objectives; it is immoral for the lawyer to invoke her own conscience to prevent the client from obtaining what the law allows the client …

On Being A Professional Elder, Thomas L. Shaffer

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Enforcement Of "Duties To Oneself": Kant Vs. Neo-Kantians, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This Article considers writings by modern scholars including Rawls, Dworkin, and D.A.J. Richards on the topic of Kant's discussion of the neutrality principle and the harm principle.

The Ethics Of Dissent And Friendship In The American Professions, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Professional ethics is commonly understood as a creature of the establishment—the study of what the better doctors and lawyers do and impose on their colleagues. But this traditional notion of ethics conveys a message that professionals need only care for their clients or patients to a certain point whether it is the end of the professional’s expertise, the end of the contract or the end of an assigned task. But this ethical understanding loses the sense of professionals serving a community. This Article dissents from that common understanding of ethics and tells dissenting-professional stories that show professional ethics through the …

The "Natural Law Tradition", John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This "tradition of natural law theory" has three main features: First, critique and rejection of ethical scepticism, dogmatism and conventionalism; Second, clarification of the methodology of descriptive and explanatory social theories (e.g., political science, economics, jurisprudence .... ); Third, critique and rejection of aggregative conceptions of the right and the just (e.g., consequentialism, utilitarianism, wealth-maximization, "proportionalism"...).

Getting Serious About Legal Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This essay is a slightly reworked version of the introduction lo the author's book American Legal Ethics (1985). Copyright 1985 by Matthew Bender & Co. , Inc. ; reprinted with permission. Portions of this essay originally appeared as an article in The University of Baltimore Law Forum, Fall, 1983, p. 6, and are used here with the permission of that journal.

The Gentleman In Professional Ethics, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The character of the “gentlemen” has served as a basis for ethics in professionalism. The purpose of this article is to describe the gentleman’s ethics, to explain its implications on the legal profession, to test its adequacy, and to argue that the gentleman’s ethic veered wrong by moving away from its religious tradition. In particular, the author analyzes its adequacy by engaging in four tests including (1) whether the gentleman’s ethic survives conceptions of class and professionalism; (2) whether it provides the skills needed for dealing with power and institutions; (3) whether it takes into account the “tragic nature of …