Legal Profession Commons^™

Roger Williams University School Of Law 20th Anniversary Celebration Announcements, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

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Ripples Against The Other Shore: The Impact Of Trauma Exposure On The Immigration Process Through Adjudicators, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Because I Said So Reconciling Civil Retroactivity Analysis In Immigration Cases With A Protective Lenity Principle, Kate Aschenbrenner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Diversity In The Legal Profession Moving From The Rhetoric To Reality, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constructing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains how lawyers like Christopher Columbus Langdell and James Barr Ames, a disciple of Langdell, employed rhetoric between 1870, when Langdell assumed the deanship at Harvard Law School, and 1920, when law had emerged as a credible academic field in the United States, to construct a persona, that of a scholar, appropriate for the law professor situated within the university. To do so, the article contextualizes the rhetoric with historical background on the law professor and legal education, draws upon rhetorical theory to give an overview of persona theory and persona analysis as a means of conducting the …

The Fully Formed Lawyer: Why Law Schools Should Require Public Service To Better Prepare Students For Private Practice, Sara Rankin

Faculty Articles

It is now commonly accepted that law schools are graduating students who are under-prepared for practice in the real world. In other words, students that perform adequately in the classroom seem to struggle or suffer — to an unnecessary degree — when they enter practice. It is as though law schools are graduating inchoate or “partially-formed” lawyers, who demonstrate classroom fluency but lack meaningful ability to grapple with the wrinkles and complexity of real-world practice. This article argues that to create practice-ready or “fully formed” lawyers, law schools should reform to prioritize hands-on training in public service. It may seem …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth Thornburg, Erik Knutsen, Carla Crifo', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

Lawyering For Groups: The Case Of American Indian Tribal Attorneys, Kristen A. Carpenter, Eli Wald

Publications

Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theory of law practice--the Standard Conception, with its principles of zealous advocacy, nonaccountability, and professional role-based morality--and the rules of professional conduct that codify it, continue to be premised on the basic antiquated assumption that the paradigmatic client-attorney relationship is between an individual client and an individual attorney. The result …

Idahoans Aren't Getting The Legal Help They Need, Patrick D. Costello

Articles

No abstract provided.

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

Who's Eating Law Firms' Lunch? The Legal Service Providers, Law Schools And New Grads At The Table, William D. Henderson, Rachel M. Zahorsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Our Place In The World: A New Relationship For Environmental Ethics And Law, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Forty years ago, at the birth of environmental law, both legal and philosophical luminaries assumed that the new field would be closely connected with environmental ethics. Instead, the two grew dramatically apart. This Article diagnoses that divorce and proposes a rapprochement. Environmental law has always grown through changes in public values; for this and other reasons, it cannot do so without ethics. Law and ethics are most relevant to each other when there are large open questions in environmental politics: lawmakers act only when some ethical clarity arises; but law can itself assist in that ethical development. This process is …

Commentator’S Response To J. Goodwin 'Norms Of Advocacy', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Professor Goodwin makes a case for the normative complexity of advocacy. She makes this case in the contexts of courtroom advocacy and advocacy in the public relations industry. I am going to examine that conclusion by reference to one of her two chosen case studies – courtroom advocacy. I am also going to agree with her conclusion that courtroom advocacy is normatively complex, although I will part company with her on a few points.

Goodwin has argued that the activity of arguing in court is normatively structured, in the sense that it is more than just persuasion, it is certainly …

Discovering E-Discovery: A Resources Guide, Timothy L. Coggins

Law Faculty Publications

E-discovery refers to discovery in civil litigation that focuses on the exchange of information in electronic form. Lainie Crouch Kaiser, a litigation attorney with McDermott Will & Emery, writes that “e-Discovery can be used as an umbrella term for both the legal and operational considerations related to how electronically stored information (ESI) is used in the modern day practice of law.”There are many types of ESI, including e-mail and office documents, voicemail, photos, video, and databases. Attorneys and others who write about e-discovery also include “raw data” as discoverable information. Ronald J. Hedges of Nixon Peabody writes that “[t]echnically, documents …

Foreword: Public Constitutional Literacy; A Conversation, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Behavioral Legal Ethics, Jean R. Sternlight, Jennifer K. Robbennolt

Scholarly Works

Complaints about lawyers’ ethics are commonplace. While it is surely the case that some attorneys deliberately choose to engage in misconduct, psychological research suggests a more complex story. It is not only “bad apples” who are unethical. Instead, ethical lapses can occur more easily and less intentionally than we might imagine. In this paper, we examine the ethical “blind spots,” slippery slopes, and “ethical fading” that may lead good people to behave badly. We then explore specific aspects of legal practice that can present particularly difficult challenges for lawyers given the nature of behavioral ethics - complex and ambiguous ethical …

Lawyers’ Professional Independence: Overrated Or Undervalued?, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the concept of lawyers’ "professional independence" in the literature of the U.S. legal profession. It begins with some reflections on the conventional meanings of professional independence, which encompasses both the bar’s collective independence to regulate its members and individual lawyers’ independence in the context of professional representations, including independence from clients, on one hand, and independence from third parties, on the other. The article suggests that the professional conduct rules are overly preoccupied with protecting lawyers’ professional independence from the corrupting influences of other professionals. The article then turns to an aspect of professional independence that has …

Unregulated Corporate Internal Investigations: Achieving Fairness For Corporate Constituents, Bruce A. Green, Ellen S. Progdor

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the relationship between corporations and their employee constituents in the context of corporate internal investigations, an unregulated multi-million dollar business. The classic approach provided in the 1981 Supreme Court opinion, Upjohn v. United States, is contrasted with the reality of modern-day internal investigations that may exploit individuals to achieve a corporate benefit with the government. Attorney-client privilege becomes an issue as corporate constituents perceive that corporate counsel is representing their interests, when in fact these internal investigators are obtaining information for the corporation to barter with the government. Legal precedent and ethics rules provide little relief …

Teaching Social Justice, Expanding Access To Justice: An Introduction, Ngai Pindell, Jackie Gardina

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Price Of Legal Education, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Teaching Of Procedure Across Common Law Systems, Erik S. Knusten, Thomas D. Rowe Jr., David Bamford, Shirley Shipman

Faculty Scholarship

What difference does the teaching of procedure make to legal education, legal scholarship, the legal profession, and civil justice reform? This first of four articles on the teaching of procedure canvasses the landscape of current approaches to the teaching of procedure in four legal systems—the United States, Canada, Australia, and England and Wales—surveying the place of procedure in the law school curriculum and in professional training, the kinds of subjects that “procedure” encompasses, and the various ways in which procedure is learned. Little sustained reflection has been carried out as to the import and impact of this longstanding law school …

How Markets Work: The Lawyer’S Version, Mitu Gulati, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we combine two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate widely among elite transactional lawyers. Surprisingly, the stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing superior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset of sovereign bond contracts produced by these same lawyers. While the stories suggest that lawyers do not compete or design innovative contracts, …

A Market For Justice: A First Empirical Look At Third Party Litigation Funding, David S. Abrams, Daniel L. Chen

All Faculty Scholarship

The alienability of legal claims holds the promise of increasing access to justice and fostering development of the law. While much theoretical work points to this possibility, no empirical work has investigated the claims, largely due to the rarity of trading in legal claims in modern systems of law. In this paper we take the first step toward empirically testing some of these theoretical claims using data from Australia. We find some evidence that third-party funding corresponds to an increase in litigation and court caseloads. Cases with third-party funders are more prominent than comparable ones. While third-party funding may have …

The Benefits Of Mindfulness For Litigators, Jan L. Jacobowitz

Articles

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Next Generation Civil Rights Lawyers: Race And Representation In The Age Of Identity Performance, Anthony V. Alfieri, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Articles

This Book Review addresses two important new books, Professor Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer and Professors Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati's Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America, and utilizes their insights to both explore the challenges that face the next generation of civil rights lawyers and offer suggestions on how this next generation of civil rights lawyers can overcome these difficulties. Overall, this Book Review highlights one similarity in the roles of black civil rights attorneys past and present: the need for lawyers in both generations to perform their identities in …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Cooperation In Legal Education And Legal Reform, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This contribution to the symposium Special Report on Kosovo After the ICJ Opinion focuses on legal education and its role in the legal reform necessary to any state that is transitioning to a new system of government. It does so by considering first the importance of legal education as a U.S. export to transition countries. This necessarily requires a reciprocal consideration of the importance to U.S. law schools of considering the external, international effect of implementing changes in the traditional structure of U.S. legal education, and about how teaching methods both distinguish differing legal systems and require cross-system consideration of …

Towards Engaged Scholarship, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Helping Your Client Create And Grow A Successful Nonprofit Organization: A Checklist For The ‘Non’ Nonprofit Attorney, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

The following feature is an abridged version of “Helping Your Client Create and Grow a Successful Nonprofit Organization,” an article which appeared in volume 67 of the Journal of The Missouri Bar in October 2011. The purpose of the original article was to provide Missouri attorneys with information and tools designed to enable them to offer pro bono legal assistance to start-up and established nonprofit organizations.

They Were Meant For Each Other: Proffessor Edward Cooper And The Rules Enabling Act, Anthony J. Scirica, Mark R. Kravitz, David F. Levi, Lee H. Rosenthal

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.