Legal Profession Commons^™

Vol. 48, No. 02 (January 20, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

Vol. 48, No. 01 (January 15, 2015)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

New Perspectives On European Women’S Legal History, Sara L. Kimble, Marion Rowekamp

Sara L Kimble

No abstract provided.

New Perspectives On European Women’S Legal History, Sara L. Kimble, Marion Rowekamp

School for New Learning Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Answering The Call: Flipping The Classroom To Prepare Practice-Ready Attorneys, Alex Berrio Matamoros

Alex Berrio Matamoros

In the rough and changing landscape of the legal job market, legal employers have called on law schools to prepare “practice ready” attorneys — newly minted members of the bar with better honed practical skills than the first year lawyers of the past. The increasing emphasis on legal skills sheds light on an interesting paradox within legal education; in legal skills courses, those that best lend themselves to active learning experiences, instructors frequently fill valuable classroom time with passive lectures to convey the related theory and best practices. Recently, several legal skills instructors have adopted a flipped classroom model to remedy ...

The Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum (Formerly "Corporate Conspiracy: How Not Calling A Conspiracy A Conspiracy Is Warping The Law On Corporate Wrongdoing"), Josephine Sandler Nelson

J.S. Nelson

The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunizes an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. The doctrine, however, misplaces incentives in contravention of agency law, criminal law, tort law, and public policy. As a result of this absence of accountability, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy.

The vacuum at the center of American conspiracy law has now warped the doctrines around it. Especially in ...

Popular Culture's Portrayal Of Attorney Decision-Making And It's Consequences- An Analysis Of An Attorney's Internal Ethical Conflict In Film, Tara M. Parente

Tara M. Parente

This paper explores how attorneys deal with ethical conflicts throughout their careers. The paper also incorporates the use of the films The Devil's Advocate and Counsellor at Law and how the attorneys in these films deal with the pressures of being an attorney. Popular culture portrays attorneys in a specific light and exemplifies the struggles they endure while advancing their careers.

Iced Cortado: A Twenty-First Century Story, Michael A. Livingston

Michael A. Livingston

Avi Shalatzki is a somewhat cranky law professor and a committed Republican with strong views on race, gender, and just about everything else. His worldview begins to disintegrate when he meets Cassandra Coen, a 20-something entrepreneur who frequents the same cafe. A story about love, politics, and generational differences in a changing--or is it disintegrating?--society

The Descent Of Man, Michael A. Livingston

Michael A. Livingston

Mordecai Lomza is a tax professor with a family in the suburbs and a subscription to every available magazine. His life is ordinary until Martha Malinconica, an old friend from law school, makes him an unusual proposal. A story about love, work, and gender roles in the 21st century.

Life In The Law-Thick World: The Legal Resource Landscape For Ordinary Americans, Gillian K. Hadfield, Jamie Heine

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Most advanced democracies are thick with law and regulation, rules that structure almost all social and economic relationships. Yet ordinary Americans, unlike their peers in other advanced systems, face this law-thick landscape with relatively few legal resources at their disposal. In this chapter, an updated version of Hadfield Higher Demand Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Resource Landscape for Ordinary Americans (2009), we document what little data exists on the performance of legal markets for non-corporate clients in the U.S. Our results suggest that while the U.S. has nearly twice as many lawyers as comparable countries ...

Lawyer, Form Thyself: Professional Identity Formation Strategies In Legal Education, Professional Responsibility, And Experiential Courses, Susan S. Daicoff

Susan Daicoff

Professional identity formation as a learning objective in law school may appear to be nontraditional and perhaps even innovative. While perhaps not a new concept, it is not typically an explicit goal of legal education. Empirical data finds that law school has demonstrable effects upon law students’ professional development; it also finds that certain nontraditional skills and competencies (or “soft skills”) make lawyers most effective. This article argues for explicit planning for and inclusion of professional identity development, including training in these nontraditional skills, in legal education. Professional identity encompasses one’s values, preferences, passions, intrinsic satisfactions, emotional intelligence, as ...

Popular Culture's Portrayal Of Attorney Decision-Making And It's Consequences- An Analysis Of An Attorney's Internal Ethical Conflict In Film, Tara M. Parente

Tara M. Parente

This paper explores how popular culture portrays attorney decision-making and its consequences. This paper compares and contrasts two films in order to exemplify how attorneys are portrayed throughout film and how this carries over into real life. Attorneys are faced with ethical dilemmas at all times, especially throughout career advancement and the decisions made tend to affect every aspect of an attorney's life.

Shooing The Vultures Away From The Consumer Bankruptcy Carcass: Attorney Fees Owed By Debtors For Marital Dissolution Are Not Domestic Support Obligations, Christopher V. Davis

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This Note will focus on consumer bankruptcy related to chapter 7 and chapter 13 filings. Section I provides an introduction to DSOs and the goals of enforcing them through bankruptcy. Section I also discusses the impact of DSO status on the automatic stay, discharge, priority status for property distribution of the bankruptcy estate, capability to reach exempt property, and application to attorney fees. Section II argues that, where attorney fees are not owed to a spouse, former spouse, or child, and do not fit within an impact exception, the fees are not DSOs, but instead are merely general non-secured claims ...

The Changing Practice Of Bankruptcy Law: An Analysis Of How Bankruptcy Practice Has Changed In The Last Decade, Michael Goldstein, Samantha Einhorn, Jill L. Phillips

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The practice of bankruptcy law has changed drastically over the last decade. An attorney starting out in the field in 2009 faces different issue than one who began in 1999. However, it’s not just the issues that come up with clients that make the practice so different, but the law of bankruptcy itself has changed. The economic downturn of the last eighteen months has changed the way the public views bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005 and In re Bateman, a case decided in 2008, altered the landscape of bankruptcy practice forever. This article will walk through a ...

Forum Selling, Daniel M. Klerman, Greg Reilly

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Forum shopping is problematic because it may lead to forum selling. For diverse motives, such as prestige, local benefits, or re-election, some judges want to hear more cases. When plaintiffs have wide choice of forum, such judges have incentives to make the law more pro-plaintiff, because plaintiffs choose the court. While only a few judges may be motivated to attract more cases, their actions can have large effects, because their courts will attract a disproportionate share of cases. For example, judges in the Eastern District of Texas have distorted the rules and practices relating to case assignment, joinder, discovery, transfer ...

Intellectual Property Rights In An Attorney’S Work Product, Ralph D. Clifford

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This paper addresses the main intellectual property consequences of practicing law and whether attorneys can prevent others from using their work-product. The article does not assume that the reader is an expert in intellectual property law; instead, it is designed to answer the types of questions practitioners have about their rights. There is one primary legal code that impacts attorneys’ rights to their work-product: the copyright law. As a broad statement, copyright law protects how an author expresses ideas. It is the system that is used to prevent others from copying a book, a movie, a musical composition, or even ...

You've Got Rhythm: Curriculum Planning And Teaching Rhythm At Work In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fostering A Respect For Our Students, Our Specialty, And The Legal Profession: Introducing Ethics And Professionalism Into The Legal Writing Curriculum, Melissa H. Weresh

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Increased Importance Of Legal Writing In The Era Of “The Vanishing Trial”, Edward D. Re

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Attorney Liability In Lien Enforcement: The Untapped Potential Of The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Adam Deutsch

Adam Deutsch

Consumer debt in the United States is valued at $11.4 trillion and an estimated 77 million individual consumers have a debt in default collection status. Debt collection is a fast growing industry troubled by unscrupulous behavior by collectors. In the second half of 2013 the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau received more than 30,000 complaints of abusive behavior by debt collectors. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act enacted by Congress in 1977 provides guidelines to limit abusive collection practices and created a private right of action for consumer victims. This article explores the powerfully broad but underutilized strict liability ...