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Full-Text Articles in Law
It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert
It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Colbert challenges the popular view that regards lawyers as selfish, greedy and uncaring to the legal needs of the outside community. In his article, he recognizes that the lawyers with whom he is familiar are fulfilling the lawyer’s ethical obligation of engaging in pro bono service and “provid[ing] legal services to those unable to pay,” while also embracing the language in the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that refers to the attorney “as a public citizen who has a special responsibility to the quality of justice.” Professor Colbert asks colleagues in the legal academy whether they …
Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On, David F. Levi
Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On, David F. Levi
Faculty Scholarship
In this tribute to Professor Robinson O. Everett, Dean David Levi questions the view that the citizen-lawyer or lawyer-statesmen models are in decline. Tracing Professor Everett’s varied career, accomplishments, and commitments to individuals and institutions; Levi contends that Everett combined the lawyer's traditional focus on the individual with an overall dedication to the larger community. Everett was not just a model citizen; he was a lawyer-citizen. Levi contends that the survival of the lawyer-citizen and lawyer-statesmen models is a matter of choice and character. Nothing in the current structure of the legal economy places these models out of reach for …
Origin Myths, Contracts, And The Hunt For Pari Passu, Mark C. Weidemaier, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Origin Myths, Contracts, And The Hunt For Pari Passu, Mark C. Weidemaier, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
Sovereign loans involve complex but largely standardized contracts, and these include some terms that no one understands. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, this article explores two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, it demonstrates that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause’s origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. The article probes this disjunction between the myths and lawyers’ actual practices and explores …