Legal Profession Commons^™

An Apology For Lawyers: Socrates And The Ethics Of Persuasion, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

Review Plato's "Apology of Socrates" in Six Great Dialogues: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, and The Republic.

Solitude, Leadership, And Lawyers, Amul R. Thapar, Samuel Rudman

Michigan Law Review

Review of Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin's Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude.

"It's Not You, It's Your Caseload": Using Cronic To Solve Indigent Defense Underfunding, Samantha Jaffe

Michigan Law Review

In the United States, defendants in both federal and state prosecutions have the constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel. That right is in jeopardy. In the postconviction setting, the standard for ineffective assistance of counsel is prohibitively high, and Congress has restricted federal habeas review. At trial, severe underfunding for state indigent defense systems has led to low pay, little support, and extreme caseloads—which combine to create conditions where lawyers simply cannot represent clients adequately. Overworked public defenders and contract attorneys represent 80 percent of state felony defendants annually. Three out of four countywide public defender systems and fifteen …

Frost For Lawyers: 'The Best Thing That We're Put Here For's To See', Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

Why should lawyers read Frost? First of all, of course, it can bring great pleasure. As Robert Pinsky put it, poetry brings pleasures “both intellectual and bodily” and can provide “a satisfaction central to life.” And this is particularly true of Frost, whose poems are both accessible and enjoyable. This does not mean that there are no challenges in his poems. Frost does make us work. Indeed, as I hope to explore in this Essay, the work he asks us to do is essential to what we can learn from his poems. But this work is itself engaging and invigorating …

Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson

Michigan Law Review

Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …

Agency And Equity: Why Do We Blame Clients For Their Lawyers' Mistakes, Adam Liptak

Michigan Law Review

If you were to ask a child whether it would be fair to execute a prisoner because his lawyer had made a mistake, the answer would be no. You might even get a look suggesting that you had asked a pretty stupid question. But judges treat the issue as a hard one, relying on a theory as casually accepted in criminal justice as it is offensive to principles of moral philosophy. This theory holds that the lawyer is the client's agent. What the agent does binds the principal. But clients and lawyers fit the agency model imperfectly. Agency law is …

Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, Monroe H. Freedman, Abbe Smith

Michigan Law Review

The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness" (p. 36), and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment" (p. 2). Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulat[e] a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue" (p. 2), one that …

Tribute To John Pickering, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Michigan Law Review

John Pickering was a grand human whose life is just cause for celebration. He taught constantly, through his own work and deeds, how lawyers in private practice can contribute hugely to the public good. John's dear friend, my revered D.C. Circuit colleague, Carl McGowan, spoke of the lawyer of technical competence content to be a working mason. The best of lawyers, Judge McGowan said, serve as architects, planners, builders in law. Along with high technical competence, the best of lawyers have a deep understanding of the nature and purposes of the law, which makes them wise and reliable counselors, broad-gauged …

Tribute To John Pickering, Raymond C. Clevenger

Michigan Law Review

This is my homage to John. I ask you to summon up in your imagination today a grand circus, a sort of Cirque du Soleil of lawyers: full of shining talents performing legal feats of wonder, but presided over by a grand ringmaster. This ringmaster knows his performers very well. He knows how to train and stroke them to high achievement. He knows how to groom the younger workers. He can keep his stars in check. He knows when to sit back with a smile, letting his charges perform and claim the applause, even when the applause rightfully belongs to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Marcia Greenberger

Michigan Law Review

This room is filled with many women lawyers. All of us loved John Pickering and are in his debt, but we are only a small number of those who do. For many decades, John guided young, and I must admit not so young, women lawyers to positions where they could stand up for their own rights and the rights of others. He worked with us to champion the causes that matter most to women and their families. John used his great stature and the enormous respect that he garnered to open doors for women to leadership positions in the bar, …

Tribute To John Pickering, Timothy B. Dyk

Michigan Law Review

It is very appropriate that we are here today to honor John Pickering, who, for more than five decades, was a leading member of our bar. I first met John when I joined the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in 1964, two years after it was founded. The three founding fathers of the firm were formidable figures, particularly to a young lawyer, and John Pickering was no exception. I do not mean that John was unkind. He was the kindest of people. But there was something particularly serious about him, and I always wondered whether that had to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Noël Anketell Kramer

Michigan Law Review

I knew John Pickering from the time that I was a second-year law student- just a few years ago, it seems-when he and Sally Katzen recruited me to join what was then the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. We remained friends thereafter, sharing among other interests an avid loyalty to the University of Michigan.

Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich

Michigan Law Review

In Part I, I expand on the distinction between the Horatian and the Menippean forms of satire and then suggest that a similarly bold division can be used to map satirical legal studies. In support of that argument, I use the example of the earliest surviving satirical legal poem within the Western tradition. My analysis of this exemplary satirical legal artifact delineates four principal modes of legal satire that will organize the ensuing discussion of more contemporary examples of the genre. In Part II, I will address the currently popular and yet somewhat novel mode of ad hominem or nominate …

Children Of A Lesser God: Gdr Lawyers In Post-Socialist Germany, Inga Markovits

Michigan Law Review

In this essay, I want to investigate German vetting policies by looking at one particular subgroup of examinees: GDR lawyers. In Germany, no other former socialist elite has been submitted to so thorough an ideological cleansing process as the legal profession. After reunification, all GDR judges and prosecutors hoping to remain in office had to undergo investigations that by March 1994 had left only 9.2% of their former numbers in permanent positions. Virtually all East German law professors were removed from their university posts. More than 5000 attorneys in Germany's eastern half are currently being examined for former contacts with …

Dream Makers: Black Judges On Justice, Julian Abele Cook Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Linn Washington, Black Judges on Justice

The Impact Of The Americans With Disabilities Act On State Bar Examiner's Inquiries Into The Psychological History Of Bar Applicants, Carol J. Banta

Michigan Law Review

This Note argues that the use of any questions based upon an applicant's psychological history in the state bar application process violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Part I demonstrates that Title II of the ADA applies to state boards of bar examiners, and that the ADA definition of a person with a disability includes a person who has sought or received psychological counseling. Part II applies the ADA and accompanying regulations to the psychological history inquiries currently used by state bar examiners and argues that such inquiries violate the ADA because they inquire specifically about disabled status. Part III …

Denaturalizing The Lawyer-Statesman, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession by Anthony T. Kronman.

Poverty Lawyering In The Golden Age, Matthew Diller

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973 by Martha F. Davis

Kill All The Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal, Kevin T. Traskos

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal by Daniel J. Kornstein

In Defense Of Lawyers, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis In the Legal Profession is Transforming American Society by Mary Ann Glendon

Give Them Back Their Lives: Recognizing Client Narrative In Case Theory, Binny Miller

Michigan Law Review

This article is about case theory and its implications for incorporating client narratives in litigation. In seeking to understand the connections between voice, narrative, and case theory, I look not only to theory but to my experience as a clinical teacher and criminal defense attorney. I explore how the practice of lawyering can be reconstructed to embrace a greater role for clients in constructing case theories, both through the images of the client the lawyer presents in the case theory and through active client participation in developing and choosing the case theory. Although one aim of case theory is to …

Making Elite Lawyers: Visions Of Law At Harvard And Beyond, Daniel A. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond by Robert Granfield

Knowledge About Legal Sanctions, Stephen Mcg. Bundy, Einer Elhauge

Michigan Law Review

Ironically, the dictum that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" itself illustrates selective transmission because, despite the widespread dissemination of this maxim to the public, ignorance of the law often is a permissible defense in actual adjudication. The divergence between the maxim and reality is a form of selective transmission that encourages individuals to learn the law, which improves their behavior, but avoids any injustice that would arise from punishing uninformed individuals for conduct they reasonably believed was lawful. We aim to offer a more systematic account of whether and when knowledge about legal sanctions, and restrictions on the …

The Deprofessionalization Of Legal Teaching And Scholarship, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

The editors have asked me to comment on Judge Edwards' double-barreled blast at legal education and the practice of law. This I am happy to do. It is an important article, stating with refreshing bluntness concerns that are widely felt but have never I think been so forcefully, so arrestingly expressed. Nevertheless I have deep disagreements with it.

A Response From The Visitor From Another Planet, J. Cunyon Gordon

Michigan Law Review

In order to admit, as I do, that the related planets of practice and academia are conjoined, one has to realize, as I have, that the legacy of the heavily doctrinal education Edwards wants to preserve may be precisely the lawyers he upbraids - lawyers who generally do not live, work, and behave ethically (with fairness, compassion, and creativity) in a complex, heterogeneous society. This recognition in turn compels the conclusion I reach that the outsiders - with their challenges to the status quo's values, their upstart theories and innovative pedagogies, and even their Star Trek-and-the-law scholarship - may help …

Students As Teachers, Teachers As Learners, Derrick Bell, Erin Edmonds

Michigan Law Review

Judge Edwards divides his analysis of the cause of the crisis in ethical lawyering into an overview and three parts. The overview and first two parts deal mainly with the role of law schools and legal curriculum in what he views as the deterioration of responsible, capable practitioners. This article takes issue with some of the assumptions, analyses, and conclusions those sections contain. The third part of Edwards' article analyzes the role of law firms in causing that same deterioration. This article agrees with and will elaborate upon that part of Edwards' treatment.

We approach Judge Edwards' article, we hope, …

Clerks In The Maze, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

It must be very difficult to be a judge - particularly an appellate judge. Not only must appellate judges reconcile often incommensurable visions of what law is, what it commands, or what it strives to achieve, but judges must do this largely alone. What little help they have in terms of actual human contact, apart from their clerks, typically takes the form of two or more advocates whose entire raison d'être is to persuade, coax, and manipulate the judge into reaching a predetermined outcome - one which often instantiates or exemplifies only the most tenuous positive connection to the rhetoric …

The Disjunction Between Judge Edwards And Professor Priest, Louis H. Pollak

Michigan Law Review

With characteristic vigor, Judge Harry Edwards, in his essay The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, has censured the law schools and, secondarily, the bar, for what he sees as profoundly disturbing trends pulling academics and practitioners farther and farther apart. Judge Edwards' censure is not proffered off the cuff. He has carefully polled his former law clerks on their perceptions of their law school years and of their postclerkship professional experiences - whether in private practice, in government, or in teaching. In the text and footnotes of his essay, Judge Edwards quotes his law clerks' …

Pro Bono Legal Work: For The Good Of Not Only The Public, But Also The Lawyer And The Legal Profession, Nadine Strossen

Michigan Law Review

I agree with Judge Edwards that "the lawyer has an ethical obligation to practice public interest law - to represent some poor clients; to advance some causes that he or she believes to be just." I also concur in Judge Edwards' opinion that "[a] person who deploys his or her doctrinal skill without concern for the public interest is merely a good legal technician - not a good lawyer."

Rather than further develop Judge Edwards' theme that lawyers have a professional responsibility to do pro bono work, I will offer another rationale for such work, grounded in professional and individual …

Stewardship, Donald B. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

While I agree with much that Judge Edwards has proposed, I thus submit that his formulations of the problem are partial - a bit like those of the blind men examining different parts of the elephant. The law's current unhappiness is only partly described as that of law schools and practicing lawyers going in different directions, of law practice becoming too commercial, or of law schools failing to serve the needs of the practicing lawyers and judges with practical teaching and scholarship. All of these observations, while correct as far as they go, miss the root of the problem, which …