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Eric Stein (1913-2011), Daniel Halberstam, Steven Ratner, Mathias Reimann

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On July 28,2011, Eric Stein, pillar of international law, pioneer of the legal study of European integration, and master of comparative law, passed away in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was ninety-eight years old. He joined this Journal's Board of Editors in 1963, serving as a regular member until 1978, and thereafter as an honorary editor. Stein was the last of that great generation of European-educated jurists who fled Nazism and became leading figures in comparative and international law in the United States.

Fidelity To Community: A Defense Of Community Lawyering, Anthony V. Alfieri

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No abstract provided.

Service Delivery, Resource Allocation And Access To Justice: Greiner And Pattanayak And The Research Imperative, Anthony V. Alfieri, Jeffrey Selbin, Jeanne Charn, Stephen Wizner

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No abstract provided.

What Is "Good Legal Writing" And Why Does It Matter?, Mark Osbeck

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Law schools face increasing pressure to improve instruction in practice-oriented skills. One of the most important of these skills is legal writing. The existing literature on legal writing contains various rules and suggestions as to how legal writers can improve their writing skills. Yet it lacks an adequate theoretical account of the fundamental nature of good legal writing. As a result, legal writers are left without a solid conceptual framework to ground the individual rules and suggestions. This Article attempts to fill the theoretical void in the literature by offering a systematic analysis of what it is for a legal …

Ethical Limits On Civil Litigation Advocacy: A Historical Perspective, Carol Rice Andrews

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This article considers and critiques the history of civil litigation conduct standards from ancient times to the present For hundreds of years in both England and France truth and reasonable behavior were constant duties owed to the judicial system itself and they remain paramount today The primary evolution has come with regard to whether any of three additional court duties just cause motive or objective merit also take precedence over client duties Early European litigation standards varyingly imposed versions of each and in nineteenth century America lawyers and scholars debated alternative models for proper litigation advocacy ranging from a full …

An Entrepreneurial Perspective On The Business Of Being In Our Profession Conference: The Law: Business Or Profession: The Continuing Relevance Of Julius Henry Cohen For The Practice Of Law In The Twenty-First Century, Steven H. Hobbs

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No abstract provided.

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

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Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …

When Federal And State Systems Converge: Foreign National Human Trafficking Victims Within Juvenile And Family Courts, Bridgette A. Carr

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This article highlights the concerns facing foreign national children who are both victims of human trafficking and under the jurisdiction of juvenile and family courts. Human trafficking is modern day slavery in which individuals, including children, are compelled into service and exploited. Foreign national human trafficking victims in juvenile and family court systems must navigate both the state system and a complex federal immigration system. This article explains the federal benefits available to these children and identifies the best practice approaches for juvenile and family court systems to increase identification of and support for foreign national child trafficking victims.jfcj_1073

Rolling Back The Tide: Challenging The Criminalization Of Immigrants In Washington State, Angélica Cházaro

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No abstract provided.

A Call For Standards: An Overview Of The Current Status And Need For Guardian Standards Of Conduct And Codes Of Ethics, Karen E. Boxx, Terry W. Hammond

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The role of trust in guardianships is rarely discussed, perhaps because of the assumption that court supervision of guardians reduces their power to act in any way other than trustworthy. However, as the number of persons needing guardianship protection increases while the resources available to courts to finance supervision decreases, the role of guardian is starting to become a more conventional fiduciary relationship complete with a hallmark downside-lack of supervision. Because of this trend, the concept of delineated standards for performance of a guardian's duties has taken on critical importance.

The 2001 Wingspan Conference, the second national conference on guardianship …

Hiring Teams, Firms, And Lawyers: Evidence Of The Evolving Relationship In The Corporate Legal Market, Michele M. Destefano, John C. Coates, Ashish Nanda, David B. Wilkins

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How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006-2007, we find that-contrary to standard depictions of corporate client-provider relationships-(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring, and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following "star" lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The …

What Is Wrong About Wrongdoing, Anthony J. Sebok

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This short article, which was prepared for a conference on civil recourse theory at Florida State University School of Law, asks whether Blackstone’s rejection of maintenance is inconsistent with the theoretical commitments of modern civil recourse theory. Blackstone strongly believed that third parties should not help victims of wrongdoing discover that they have been wronged, this article asks whether modern civil recourse theory is committed to the position (now in retreat throughout common law nations) that third parties who help strangers’ lawsuits are acting against the public interest (or, as Blackstone put it, are “pests of society . . . …

Big Law And Risk Management: Case Studies Of Litigation, Deals, And Diversity, Anthony V. Alfieri

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No abstract provided.

Illegal Aid: Legal Assistance To Immigrants In The United States, Geoffrey Heeren

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There is an enormous unmet need for immigrant legal aid in the United States. This is partly due to regulations that bar federally funded legal services organizations from representing many types of immigrants. The possible repeal of these restrictions is rarely discussed as a means to expand immigrant access to counsel. Federal funding for immigrant legal aid appears to have become taboo, despite the fact that for much of its history, legal aid was deeply connected to immigration. This forgotten history reveals that there was once broad national consensus in favor of immigrant legal aid; it became contentious and faced …

Detention And Deportation With Inadequate Due Process: The Devastating Consequences Of Juvenile Involvement With Law Enforcement For Immigrant Youth, Elizabeth Frankel

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No abstract provided.

Of The Conditional Fee As A Response To Lawyers, Claire Hill, Richard W. Painter

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There are radically differing views as to whether Dodd-Frank took the right approach, and whether it will be successful or even beneficial. But even the most optimistic scenario leaves a significant problem unaddressed. One important cause of the crisis was that some banks and their lawyers had been looking for-and finding-clever ways to honor the letter of the law while violating its spirit, including by "pushing the envelope" as far as it will go (and in some cases, further). The legal opinion rendered in Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 transaction, discussed more fully below, is but one example of the type …

The Antecedents Of Disputes: Complaining And Claiming, Herbert M. Kritzer

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This paper focuses on the earliest stages of the problem resolution function of law and legal institutions: the emergence of grievances and their communication to a responsible party as complaints and claims. While the literature on this subject is broad, both in terms of methods and in terms of the fairly large number of countries where empirical research on this subject has been conducted, it seems appropriate to ask the question, what do we know and not know about this subject? This paper seeks to answer this question and to suggest fruitful avenues of future inquiry. I first discuss the …

Pro Se Litigation In Times Of Financial Hardship--A Legal Crisis And Its Solutions, Richard W. Painter

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This article discusses recent ABA reports on pro se legal representation and changes to the Rules of Professional Conduct that give lawyers more flexibility in assisting pro se litigants. Because many pro se representations are in family law cases, the article emphasizes the difficulties of pro se litigants in family court. The article then proposes that unauthorized practice of law restrictions be liberalized to allow on-line providers to sell legal forms, assistance with completion of those forms and other law related services. The benefits of allowing such non-lawyer providers entry into the market for legal services outweigh the potential compromise …

Helping Haiti In The Wake Of Disaster: Law Students As First Responders, Melissa Gibson Swain, Jonel Newman

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No abstract provided.

Redefining Human Rights Lawyering Through The Lens Of Critical Theory: Lessons For Pedagogy And Practice, Caroline Bettinger-López, Davida Finger, Meetali Jain, Jonel Newman, Sarah Paoletti, Deborah M. Weissman

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No abstract provided.

Examining The Reality Of Foreign National Child Victims Of Human Trafficking In The United States, Bridgette A. Carr

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Human traffickers prey on the vulnerabilities of other people. Poverty, lack of education, and language barriers are keys that human traffickers use to successfully exploit others. For foreign national children who have been trafficked in the United States, these same vulnerabilities are often ignored by the immigration system. From its inception, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) has been touted as a tool to combat grave human rights violations that affect children. In fact, the TVPA's legislative history is rife with stories, statistics, and anecdotes involving children-often young girls. The TVPA has always recognized the failure of a one-size-fits-all approach …

The Rise In Elder Bankruptcy Filings And The Failure Of U.S. Bankruptcy Law, John A. E. Pottow

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Recent empirical legal scholarship on the consumer bankruptcy system has uncovered a marked rise in the proportion of elder Americans filing for relief under the Bankruptcy Code. But these studies have not probed the reasons behind that rise, an omission this Article seeks to address. Professor John Pottow and colleagues recently assembled the new dataset of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project (CBP), the largest national sample of consumer debtors in this country, which he uses to explore the sources of elder bankruptcy. The findings are both striking and ominous. While multiple factors, such as health problems and medical debts, contribute to …

The Inauthentic Claim, Anthony J. Sebok

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This Article takes a critical look at the persistence of legal doctrines that prohibit or limit property rights in litigation. The Article focuses on prohibitions on assignment and maintenance. Assignment of personal injury tort claims is prohibited throughout the United States, while the assignment of other claims, such as fraud and professional malpractice, is prohibited in a large number of states. Maintenance, in which a stranger provides something of value to a litigant in order to support or promote the litigation, is prohibited in varying degrees in the United States.

These doctrines might seem quite independent of each other at …

Clement Clay Torbert And Alabama Law Reform Alabama Legal Issues Series, Tony A. Freyer, Paul M. Pruitt Jr., Volney Riser

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No abstract provided.

The Price Of Pay To Play In Securities Class Actions, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi, Drew T. Johnson-Skinner

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We study the effect of campaign contributions to lead plaintiffs—“pay to play”—on the level of attorney fees in securities class actions. We find that state pension funds generally pay lower attorney fees when they serve as lead plaintiffs in securities class actions than do individual investors serving in that capacity, and larger funds negotiate for lower fees. This differential disappears, however, when we control for campaign contributions made to offcials with infuence over state pension funds. This effect is most pronounced when we focus on state pension funds that receive the largest campaign contributions and that associate repeatedly as lead …

No Harm, No Foul? Why Harmless Error Analysis Should Not Be Used To Review Wrongful Denials Of Counsel To Parents In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek Sankaran

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The application of a harmless error standard by appellate courts reviewing erroneous denials of counsel in child protective cases undermines a critical procedural right that safeguards the interests of parents and children. Case law reveals that trial courts, on numerous occasions, improperly reject valid requests for counsel, forcing parents to navigate the child welfare system without an advocate. Appellate courts excuse these violations by speculating that the denials caused no significant harm to the parents, which is a conclusion that a court can never reach with any certainty. The only appropriate remedy for this significant problem is a bright-line rule …

Exclusion From Income Of Compensation For Services And Pooling Of Labor Occurring In A Noncommercial Setting, Douglas A. Kahn

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When cash is received for services, it typically will constitute gross income to the recipient.' But what if the payments are made in a noncommercial setting such as the payment by a parent to a child for mowing the lawn or performing household chores? As discussed later in this Essay, there are reasons to conclude that such payments do not constitute income. The problem of how to treat receipts from a noncommercial activity frequently arises in the context of an exchange of services. A similar problem arises when services are provided by several persons pursuant to a pooling of labor …

Taking The Business Out Of Work Product, Michele M. Destefano Beardslee

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Over the past fifteen years, a common set of questions has surfaced in different areas of scholarship about the breadth of the corporate attorney's role: Should the corporate attorney provide business advice when providing legal advice? Should the corporate attorney provide counsel related to other disciplines such as public relations, social responsibility, morals, accounting, and/or investment banking? Should the corporate attorney prevent corporate wrongdoing? Questions like these resound in the scholarship addressing the risks and benefits of multi-disciplinary partnerships, gatekeeping, moral counseling, ancillary services, and the application of the attorney-client privilege. When looked at in combination, these segregated discussions equate …

Best Practices For Hiring And Retaining A Diverse Law Faculty, Kellye Y, Testy

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As with all institutions, the history, character, identity, and accomplishments of each law school are the direct result of its people and their acts. For that simple reason, diversity is critical; it goes to the very core of what the institution is and what it does. With legal institutions, in particular, diversity plays a critical role in shaping the perception of the institution held by persons outside of it. In order for our system of law to function as the bedrock of our democratic society that it aims to be, legal institutions must be perceived as fair and just. If …

Tax Lawyers, Tax Defiance, And The Ethics Of Casual Conversation,, Michael Hatfield

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This essay is to help tax lawyers decide how to handle casual conversations centered on denying, defying, or destroying the tax system. One option is to walk away, ending the conversation and silencing the dialogue. The next option is to engage. I want to persuade tax lawyers that they should usually engage in the conversation. I try to do this in Part III.

There are two kinds of legal ethics essays, and one must choose which kind to write, and it is useful to the reader to know upfront which kind the author chose to write. One kind begins with …