Legal History Commons^™

Institutional And Individual Justification In Legal Ethics: The Problem Of Client Selection, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Civil Obedience, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Discussions of legal ethics generally assume that lawyers should deliberate straightforwardly on the basis of reasons to act or refrain from acting. This model of deliberation fails to account for the role of the law in resolving normative disagreement and coordinating social activity by people who do not share comprehensive ethical doctrines. The law represents a collective decision about what citizens ought to do, which replaces the reasons individuals would otherwise have to act. This Article contends that legal ethics ought to be understood as an aspect of this theory of the authority of law. On this account, lawyers have …

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 …

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

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Aba And Mdps: Context, History, And Process, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Boiling Pot Of Lawyer Conflicts In Bankruptcy, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

I take up here only two modest pieces of the current puzzle of lawyer conflicts of interest in bankruptcy practice. One involves the decision of the American Law Institute (hereinafter "ALI") to sidestep the entire field in the course of drafting its Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers (hereinafter "Restatement"). The other involves the decision of the National Bankruptcy Review Commission (hereinafter "NBRC") to refuse to recommend that Congress do anything at all major to disturb existing law in the same realm. Either the law of lawyer conflicts in bankruptcy has been blessed in its present state by two prestigious …

Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, And The Rhetoric Of Interdisciplinarity, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article considers how lawyers and nonlawyers discuss the contribution of interdisciplinary scholarship to the law as a means of rethinking the relationship between these differences. The article first examines the arguments of the nineteenth-century lawyer Henry Maine and of the twentieth-century anthropologist Edmund Leach on the subject, and notes the difference between Maine's emphasis on "movement" from one theoretical discovery to another and Leach's emphasis on creating relationships between disciplines by exploiting a "space in between" the two. Then, turning to contemporary scholarship in legal anthropology, "Law and Society," and the sociology of law, the article critiques the rigid …