Law Commons^™

Nonlegal Regulation Of The Legal Profession: Social Norms In Professional Communities, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What should be done about lawyers who persist in violating ethical norms that are not embodied in positive disciplinary rules? That question has been a recurrent theme in recent legal ethics scholarship. One response has been to propose, experiment, amend, tinker, draft, comment, and redraft, in an attempt to codify the standard of conduct observed to be flouted widely by the practicing bar. Bar associations and courts are seemingly engaged in a never-ending process of promulgating new codes of professional conduct or rules of procedure under which lawyers may be sanctioned for such conduct as bringing frivolous lawsuits, abusing the …

Lawyer Crimes: Beyond The Law?, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Duty Of Confidentiality, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Hate And The Bar: Is The Hale Case Mccarthyism Redux Or A Victory For Racial Equality?, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The application of the constitutional free expression guarantee to the activities of the organized bar is one of the most important unexplored areas of legal ethics. In this essay I will consider in particular the question of whether an applicant may be denied admission to the bar for involvement with hateful or discriminatory activities. This question reveals the tension between the first amendment principle, established after the agonizing struggles of the McCarthy era, that no one may be denied membership in the bar because of his or her beliefs alone, and the plenary authority of bar associations to make predictive …

Morality, Motivation, And The Professionalism Movement, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Free Speech For Lawyers, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most important unanswered questions in legal ethics is how the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression ought to apply to the speech of attorneys acting in their official capacity. The Supreme Court has addressed numerous First Amendment issues involving lawyers, of course, but in all of them has declined to consider directly the central conceptual issue of whether lawyers possess diminished free expression rights, as compared with ordinary, non-lawyer citizens.

The arguments of this Article are synthetic in structure. I do not aim just to criticize reported cases, but rather to show how the regulation of lawyers' …

Toward A History Of The Legalization Of American Legal Ethics -- I. Origins, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications