Law Commons^™

Financial Rewards For Whistleblowing Lawyers, Nancy J. Moore, Kathleen Clark

Faculty Scholarship

The federal government relies increasingly on whistleblowers to ferret out fraud, and has awarded whistleblowers over $4 billion under the False Claims Act and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform and Consumer Protection Act. May lawyers ethically seek whistleblower rewards under these federal statutes? A handful of lawyers have tried to do so as FCA qui tam relators. They have not yet succeeded, but several court decisions suggest that they might be able to do so under confidentiality exceptions to state ethics law, which several courts have held are not preempted by the FCA. No lawyer has been publicly identified as …

An Empirical Method For Materiality: Would Conflict Of Interest Disclosures Change Patient Decisions?, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The law has long been concerned with the agency problems that arise when advisors, such as attorneys or physicians, put themselves in financial relationships that create conflicts of interest. If the financial relationship is “material” to the transactions proposed by the advisor, then non-disclosure of that information may be pertinent to claims of malpractice, informed consent, and even fraud, as well as to professional discipline. In these sorts of cases, materiality is closely related to the question of causation, roughly turning on whether the withheld information might have changed the decision of a reasonable advisee (i.e., patient). The injured plaintiff …

Multi-Institutional Healthcare Ethics Committees: The Procedurally Fair Internal Dispute Resolution Mechanism, Thaddeus Mason Pope

Faculty Scholarship

2.6 million Americans die each year. A majority of these deaths occur in a healthcare institution as the result of a deliberate decision to stop life sustaining medical treatment. Unfortunately, these end-of-life decisions are marked with significant conflict between patients' family members and healthcare providers. Healthcare ethics committees (HECs) have been the dispute resolution forum for many of these conflicts.

HECs generally have been considered to play a mere advisory, facilitative role. But, in fact, HECs often serve a decision making role. Both in law and practice HECs increasingly have been given significant authority and responsibility to make treatment decisions. …

Conflicts In Property, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Property concerns conflicts – both conflicts between individuals and conflicts of interest. Conflicts between individuals have long been the paradigmatic property focus. According to this view, property debates circle around issues of autonomy and productive competition. But this is an impoverished view. In this Article, we shift attention to conflicts of interest. By helping people manage conflicts of interest, a well-governed property system balances interdependence with autonomy and productive cooperation with productive competition. We identify three mechanisms woven throughout property law that help manage conflicts of interest: (1) internalization of externalities; (2) democratization of management; and (3) de-escalation of transactions. …

Unconstitutional Police Searches And Collective Responsibility, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Then the police officer told the suspect, without just cause, "I bet you are hiding [drugs] under your balls. If you have drugs under your balls, I am going to fuck your balls up."

Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski document astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their groundbreaking article, "Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the U.S. Constitution." By their conservative estimate, 30% of the 115 police searches they studied – searches that were conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20% nationwide, that were systematically observed by trained field observers, and that were coded …

Fortifying A Law Firm's Ethical Infrastructure: Avoiding Legal Malpractice Claims Based On Conflicts Of Interest, Susan Saab Fortney, Jett Hanna

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the prevailing problem of malpractice claims based on conflicts of interest. Part I of this article introduces the topic by underscoring the seriousness of all conflicts of interest and recommending preventative action. Part II describes measures that law firms can take to detect and manage conflicts and analyzes the effect of the firm’s ability to avoid conflicts claims on a firm’s ethical infrastructure. Part III focuses on some of the most common conflicts situations that result in malpractice claims and sanctions. The discussion includes selected conflicts cases that illustrate problems and patterns. Part IV concludes by urging …

Disciplinary Restrictions On Multidisciplinary Practice: Their Derivation, Their Development, And Some Implications For The Core Values Debate The Future Of The Profession: A Symposium On Multidisciplinary Practice, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Many of the legal profession's disciplinary rules are of venerable lineage. For example, the provisions of contemporary disciplinary codes concerning conflicts of interest derive from the 1908 Canons of Professional Ethics (Canons), which, in turn, can be traced back to late nineteenth century state ethics codes, to mid-nineteenth-century lectures and writings, 3 and to earlier common-law agency principles. Although lawyers to- day disagree about what the precise contours of the conflict rules should be, these rules embody basic principles of loyalty, competence and confidentiality that are fundamental, traditional, and universally supported by lawyers. These are defining principles for the practice …

Conflicts Of Interests In The Representation Of Children, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

Conflicts of interests arise whenever the representation of a client may be materially limited by the lawyer's duties to either another client or a third person or by the interests of the lawyer herself.' Analyzing such conflicts typically requires identifying situations involving a potentially impermissible conflict, determining whether the conflict is consentable, and, if it is, obtaining consent after full disclosure.2 Conflicts analysis is difficult enough when the client is an adult.3 When the client is a child, however, the analysis is complicated by a number of factors. For example, in the wide variety of cases in which children (or …

Through A Glass, Darkly: How The Court Sees Motions To Disqualify Criminal Defense Lawyers , Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Although raised frequently in the lower courts, the question of what the trial judge's role is in conflict-of-interest cases has, for nearly half a century, lurked in the background of the Supreme Court's decisions concerning the scope of a criminal defendant's right to the undivided loyalty of his attorney. Last term, as its conflict-of-interest jurisprudence reached middle age, the Court had the opportunity to articulate its views on that question. In Wheat v. United States, the Court held that a trial judge has discretion to disqualify defense counsel, even over the defendant's objection, if a serious possibility for a conflict …

Her Brother's Keeper: The Prosecutor's Responsibility When Defense Counsel Has A Potential Conflict Of Interest , Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

What are the responsibilities of a prosecutor when she learns in the course of preparing for trial that defense counsel has a potential conflict of interest? Must the prosecutor alert defense counsel and the trial judge to the problem? May she move to disqualify defense counsel? This Article explores the responsibilities that courts have begun to, and ought to, impose on prosecutors. In large part, the prosecutor's responsibilities are subordinate to those of defense counsel and the trial judge, who have the primary responsibility to ensure that the defendant's right to independent counsel is not unfairly abridged. Therefore, as background …