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Full-Text Articles in Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Twenty Years After Krieger V Law Society Of Alberta: Law Society Discipline Of Crown Prosecutors And Government Lawyers, Andrew Flavelle Martin
Twenty Years After Krieger V Law Society Of Alberta: Law Society Discipline Of Crown Prosecutors And Government Lawyers, Andrew Flavelle Martin
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
Krieger v. Law Society of Alberta held that provincial and territorial law societies have disciplinary jurisdiction over Crown prosecutors for conduct outside of prosecutorial discretion. The reasoning in Krieger would also apply to government lawyers. The apparent consensus is that law societies rarely exercise that jurisdiction. But in those rare instances, what conduct do Canadian law societies discipline Crown prosecutors and government lawyers for? In this article, I canvass reported disciplinary decisions to demonstrate that, while law societies sometimes discipline Crown prosecutors for violations unique to those lawyers, they often do so for violations applicable to all lawyers — particularly …
Hidden Nondefense: Partisanship In State Attorneys General Amicus Briefs And The Need For Transparency, Lisa Grumet
Hidden Nondefense: Partisanship In State Attorneys General Amicus Briefs And The Need For Transparency, Lisa Grumet
Articles & Chapters
In all fifty states, the State Attorney General (SAG) — as the state’s chief legal officer — is charged with defending state laws that are challenged in court. If an SAG declines to defend or challenges a state law on the ground that it is unconstitutional — an action scholars describe as “nondefense” — the SAG ordinarily will disclose this decision to the public.
This Essay discusses a hidden form of nondefense that can occur when SAGs file amicus curiae briefs on behalf of their states in matters before the U.S. Supreme Court. Surprisingly, some SAGs have joined multistate amicus …
Government Lawyers In The Liberal State, W. Bradley Wendel
Government Lawyers In The Liberal State, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers
Criticism of the “politicization” of the role of federal government lawyers has been intense in recent years, with the scandals over the hiring practices at the Department of Justice, and the advice given to the administration by lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, concerning various aspects of the post-9/11 national security environment. Unfortunately, many of these critiques do not hold up very well under scrutiny. We lack a coherent account of what it means to “politicize” the practice of interpreting and applying the law. This paper argues that our evaluative discourse about the ethics of government lawyers is inadequately …