Law Commons^™

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 …

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' …