Law Commons^™

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students' answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students’ answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …

(At Least) Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Election Lies, Helen Norton

Publications

Lies take many forms. Because lies vary so greatly in their motivations and consequences (among many other qualities), philosophers have long sought to catalog them to help make sense of their diversity and complexity. Legal scholars too have classified lies in various ways to explain why we punish some and protect others. This symposium essay offers yet another taxonomy of lies, focusing specifically on election lies — that is, lies told during or about elections. We can divide and describe election lies in a wide variety of ways: by speaker, by motive, by subject matter, by audience, by means of …

Celebrating Mundane Conflict, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This Article interrogates the dominant conception of conflict and challenges the narrative of conflict as hard, difficult and painful to engage. The Article reveals two primary framing errors that cause one to misperceive how ubiquitous and ordinary is conflict. The first error is to misperceive conflict as categorical — something either is a conflict or it is not. People make that error as a way of trying to avoid conflict. People falsely hope that there might be a category of “not conflict,” like disagreements, that will be easier to navigate. The second error is to misperceive the world and individuals …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Envisioning 100% Access To Justice In Colorado, Daniel M. Taubman, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Love, Anger, And Lawyering, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

This essay explores how mindfulness practices helped one lawyer, now legal scholar, explore the roles of love and anger in lawyering.

Practicing Practical Wisdom, Deborah J. Cantrell, Kenneth Sharpe

Publications

Wisdom is not an innate character trait; no one automatically is wise; wisdom is learned and acquired. More importantly, one can learn and acquire wisdom intentionally and skillfully — one can practice it. And, if the practice is structured in particular ways, the practice will improve one’s capacities to act with wisdom. This article clarifies theoretical muddiness and pedagogical imprecision by bringing together two important and robust strands of legal ethics literature. The first strand focuses on what the appropriate role of a lawyer is in a just society, while the second focuses on how a lawyer learns to be, …

Meta-Mindfulness: A New Hope, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This Essay starts by tracing its humble origins to an earlier, related and unique law review article, namely, Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs of an Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education and Parenting. This Essay describes various professional responses to Tiger Cub Strikes Back, provides an update of some developments in research about parenting and legal education since Tiger Cub Strikes Back, and recounts a few personal stories about mindfulness and related to being an ex-child prodigy. This Essay then analyzes meta-mindfulness, defined as mindfulness about mindfulness. This Essay discusses how mindfulness about mindfulness can help facilitate the …

How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Lawyers who behave unethically and unprofessionally do so for various reasons, ranging from intention to carelessness. Lawyer misconduct can also result from decision-making flaws. Psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath, in their best-selling book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, suggest a process to improve people’s decision-making. They introduce the acronym WRAP as the mnemonic for these decision-making heuristics: (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality-test your assumptions, (3) Attain distance before deciding, and (4) Prepare to be wrong. The WRAP process mitigates these cognitive biases: (1) narrow framing of a decision problem, (2) …

Slides: “Human Sustainability” In Natural Resources Industries: The New Frontier In Compliance, Social Responsibility, Disclosure, And Transparency, T. Markus Funk

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: T. Markus Funk, Partner, Perkins Coie

21 slides

Agenda: Free, Prior And Informed Consent: Pathways For A New Millennium, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law. American Indian Law Program

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

Presented by the University of Colorado's American Indian Law Program and the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy & the Environment.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), along with treaties, instruments, and decisions of international law, recognizes that indigenous peoples have the right to give "free, prior, and informed consent" to legislation and development affecting their lands, natural resources, and other interests, and to receive remedies for losses of property taken without such consent. With approximately 150 nations, including the United States, endorsing the UNDRIP, this requirement gives rise to emerging standards, obligations, and opportunities …

Indigenous Peoples’ Right Of Free Prior Informed Consent With Respect To Indigenous Lands, Territories And Resources (June 28, 2010), Indian Law Resource Center

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

3 pages.

"June 28, 2010"

Indigenous Peoples’ Right Of Free Prior Informed Consent With Respect To Indigenous Lands, Territories And Resources (United Nations Workshop, 17-19 January 2005), Indian Law Resource Center

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

3 pages.

U.N. Doc PFII/2004/WS.2/6

Free, Prior And Informed Consent: Ilo 169 And Undrip, Kelsey Peterson

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

2 pages.

"Kelsey Peterson, American Indian Law Program Fellow, University of Colorado Law School Class of 2015"

Principles Of International Law For Multilateral Development Banks: The Obligation To Respect Human Rights, Robert T. Coulter, Leonardo A. Crippa, Emily Wann

Free, Prior and Informed Consent: Pathways for a New Millennium (November 1)

41 pages.

"January, 2009"

www.indianlaw.org

Book Review, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This review of Leo Katz's book, Why the Law is So Perverse, addresses three questions. First, does Katz draw the appropriate normative conclusions about legal perversities based on their connections to social choice theory? In other words, what are the legal ethics and professionalism implications of his book? Second, how does each of the legal perversities in the book follow from a particular social choice theory result? In other words, what is the precise theoretical connection between each of the legal perversities discussed and an impossibility theorem in social choice theory? Third, can we reinterpret our understanding of the …

Professionalism And The New Normal, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Lawyering For Groups: The Case Of American Indian Tribal Attorneys, Kristen A. Carpenter, Eli Wald

Publications

Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theory of law practice--the Standard Conception, with its principles of zealous advocacy, nonaccountability, and professional role-based morality--and the rules of professional conduct that codify it, continue to be premised on the basic antiquated assumption that the paradigmatic client-attorney relationship is between an individual client and an individual attorney. The result …

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs' Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Publications

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiffs' lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs' briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for win-loss rate, bad plaintiffs' briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling. In a major legal service market, how …

Tiger Cub Strikes Back: Memoirs Of An Ex-Child Prodigy About Legal Education And Parenting, Peter H. Huang

Publications

I am a Chinese American who at 14 enrolled at Princeton and at 17 began my applied mathematics Ph.D. at Harvard. I was a first-year law student at the University of Chicago before transferring to Stanford, preferring the latter's pedagogical culture. This Article offers a complementary account to Amy Chua's parenting memoir. The Article discusses how mainstream legal education and tiger parenting are similar and how they can be improved by fostering life-long learning about character strengths, emotions, and ethics. I also recount how a senior professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school claimed to have gamed the U.S. …

Lawyers, Loyalty And Social Change, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

Fundamentally, cause lawyers engage in their work to make social change. Scholars of cause lawyering have generated a robust and rich literature considering important issues, such as what kinds of advocacy strategies best generate social change and what features of the relationship between cause client and cause lawyer are critical to an engaged and mutual relationship. But, the literature has neglected a key aspect of the cause lawyer and client relationship: whether the particular kind of loyalty that exists as between them hinders or helps in achieving social change. This Article fills that void. It first illuminates the particular features …

Colorado Legal Ethics: Guide To Resources, Robert M. Linz

Publications

No abstract provided.

What's Love Got To Do With It?: Contemporary Lessons On Lawyerly Advocacy From The Preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

Lawyers have long been inspired by the advocacy work of Martin Luther King, Jr. From his work on the Montgomery bus boycott, to lunch counter sit-ins, to his March on Washington, Dr. King demonstrated skilled advocacy that resulted in important legal advancements. While lawyers give primacy to Dr. King as an advocate, Dr. King gave primacy to his work as a preacher. This article challenges the legal profession to consider the ways in which Dr. King, the preacher, may be as inspirational and instructive as Dr. King, the civil rights icon. Just as Dr. King's religious values were not abstracted …

Can Compassionate Practice Also Be Good Legal Practice?: Answers From The Lives Of Buddhist Lawyers, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

What does it mean to say that one is a "good lawyer" in the United States? The dominant view is that a lawyer is a zealous advocate owing loyalty to, and taking direction from, the client. The lawyer is singularly focused and hyper-rationality is prized. This article challenges that narrative. Using the real lives of a group of lawyers across the United States, this article offers rich and nuanced descriptive data about the possibilities of "good lawyering" through compassion, equanimity, and an expanded notion of honesty. This article contributes importantly to the debate about what it means to be a …

Slides: Adapting Western Water Policy For Resilience Under Climate Change, Bonnie G. Colby

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Dr. Bonnie G. Colby, Professor of Resource Economics & Hydrology, University of Arizona Department of Agriculture & Resource Economics

22 slides

Slides: The Big Questions, Doug Kenney

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Doug Kenney, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado Law School

7 slides

Slides: Linking Growth, Land Use And Water, Jim Holway

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Jim Holway, Global Institute of Sustainability, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Arizona Water Institute, Arizona State University

29 slides

Slides: The Urbanizing West: Limits To Water, Limits To Growth, Lora A. Lucero

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Lora A. Lucero, AICP, American Planning Association

18 slides

Slides: Water Needs And Strategies For A Sustainable Future, Shaun Mcgrath

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Shaun McGrath, Program Director, Western Governors’ Association

25 slides