Law Commons^™

Intersectionality And Accessibility To Social Services, Nora Khuder

Thinking Matters Symposium

In times of a crisis the intersectionality of sex, class, and ability creates a vulnerable population. Many available “resources'' are exhausted, due to high demand. Intersectionality signifies the impact of multiple intersecting identities in society as a direct correlation to the specific and unique barriers of marginalized groups. Resources are currently limited due to the lack of representative data. Although many studies have been conducted, many researchers have failed to capture the need of social services in rural areas.

The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau

Maine Law Review

In 1989, the Maine Commission on Legal Needs was formed to study the civil legal needs of Maine's poor population and to develop a plan for meeting those needs. Similar projects have been undertaken in a number of other states and by the American Bar Association in recent years. Each study has revealed a significant unmet need among the poor for assistance with legal problems. There seems little doubt that the situation is serious and widespread. The difficulty lies in finding a solution. One proposal that has been advanced is mandatory pro bono, a program that would require attorneys to …

Athens Access To Justice Initiative: Judicial Leadership + Bar Support + Local Resources = Powerful Synergy, Eleanor Lanier

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Alternative Business Structures: Good For The Public, Good For The Lawyers, Jayne R. Reardon

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

There has been a shift in consumer behavior over the last several decades. To keep up with the transforming consumer, many professions have changed the way they do business. Yet lawyers continue to deliver services the way they have since the founding of our country. Bar associations and legal ethicists have long debated the idea of allowing lawyers to practice in “alternative business structures,” where lawyers and nonlawyers can co-own and co-manage a business to deliver legal services. This Article argues these types of businesses inhibit lawyers’ ability to provide better legal services to the public and that the legal …

Poverty, The Great Unequalizer: Improving The Delivery System For Civil Legal Aid, Latonia Haney Keith

Catholic University Law Review

When individuals in the United States face civil justice issues, they are not entitled to legal counsel and therefore must secure paid counsel, proceed pro se or qualify for free legal assistance. As a result of the economic downturn, the number of Americans who are unable to afford legal counsel is now at an all-time high. In response to this ever-widening justice gap, the public interest community has launched multiple initiatives to supplement the underfunded legal aid system. Though valiant, this article argues that this approach has unfortunately created a complex, fragmented and overlapping delivery system for legal aid. This …

Addressing Cultural Bias In The Legal Profession, Debra Chopp

Articles

Over the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of scholarship that explores the problem of implicit bias. Through this work, commentators have taken pains to define the phenomenon and to describe the ways in which it contributes to misunderstanding, discrimination, inequality, and more. This article addresses the role of implicit cultural bias in the delivery of legal services. Lawyers routinely represent clients with backgrounds and experiences that are vastly different from their own, and the fact of these differences can impede understanding, communication, and, ultimately, effective representation. While other professions, such as medicine and social work, have adopted …

The Impact Of Technological Developments On The Rules Of Attorney Ethics Regarding Attorney–Client Privilege, Confidentiality, And Social Media, Pamela A. Bresnahan, Lucian T. Pera

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This article focuses on the development of the law of ethics and technology. Emphasis is placed on how technological developments have affected the rules and means by which lawyers practice law and certain ethical pitfalls that have developed hand-in-hand with technological advancements. Topics examined include: (1) the ways by which electronic communication has increased the potential for the attorney–client privilege to be waived and the resulting impact on the present-day practice of law; (2) the effect of social media on lawyers’ ethical obligations, including counseling clients regarding the client’s use of social media and the lawyer’s own use of social …

Can A Little Representation Be A Dangerous Thing?, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

Access to justice interventions that provide a little representation, including nonlawyer representation and various forms of limited legal services, may be valuable solutions for low- and middle-income Americans. However, a thoughtful approach to improving access to justice efforts should recognize that a little representation may have risks. In particular, one potential risk of a little representation is that while it provides assistance with a discrete legal need in a specific moment, the nature of the assistance is incompatible with challenging the law. As a result, individual litigants do not have the benefit of legal challenges in their own cases and …

Trending @ Rwulaw: Veronica Paricio's Post: What We Did Last Summer..., Veronica Paricio

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

A Tale Of Three “Professions”: Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching, Ray Campbell

Ray W Campbell

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of 'professionalism;' others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned.

These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

What would legal education look like if it were designed from the ground up for a world in which legal services have undergone profound and irreversible change? Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

Future Of Legal Aid, Wayne Moore

wayne moore

The Future of Legal Aid

Abstract

This article predicts the future of legal aid in the U.S. It begins by examining the tools other countries use for shaping the future of legal aid and explains why these methods will not work in the U.S. It also acknowledges that changes that require a significant increase in funding are not likely to occur in the foreseeable future. What’s left are methods that allow providers to do more with the resources they have, namely the adoption of systems. The U.S. is currently experiencing a revolution in the use of systems to expand and …

Women In The Legal Profession, 1970-2010: A Study Of The Global Supply Of Lawyers, Ethan Michelson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article represents the first effort to measure the changing global supply and composition of lawyers over a period of several decades. In it I assemble data on lawyer populations and gender compositions from eighty-six countries and use them to calculate estimates for the rest of the world in order to paint a truly global picture of the changing supply of lawyers in general and of female lawyers in particular. Most of the data supporting my analyses come from a unique and hitherto untapped source: individual-level census data. Results reveal a clear sequence in the global process of lawyer feminization. …

Time For A Top-Tier Law School In Arkansas, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Richard J. Peltz-Steele

A simple change in state law could improve the quality of legal education in Arkansas and the quality of legal services available to our consumers - and save significant amounts of taxpayers' money. With an Afterword on academic freedom. Also available from Advance Arkansas Institute website.

Special Populations: Mobilization For Change

Touro Law Review

This Article is based on a transcript of a break-out discussion which took place at An Obvious Truth: Creating an Action Blueprint for a Civil Right to Counsel in New York State, held at Touro Law Center, Central Islip, New York, in March 2008. The discussion was moderated by Karen L. Nicolson, Michael Williams, and Toby Golick.

This Article assesses the needs of various special populations and the possible strategies and solutions to create change through enacting a civil right to counsel. The Article is intended to capture information and viewpoints of the people who participated in the break-out discussion …

Toward A Right To Counsel In Civil Cases In New York State: A Report Of The New York State Bar Association, Laura K. Abel

Touro Law Review

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

Articles

No abstract provided.

Time For A Top-Tier Law School In Arkansas, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

A simple change in state law could improve the quality of legal education in Arkansas and the quality of legal services available to our consumers - and save significant amounts of taxpayers' money. With an Afterword on academic freedom. Also available from Advance Arkansas Institute website.

An Article We Wrote To Ourselves In The Future: Early 21st Century Views On Ethics And The Internet., David Hricik, Prashant Patel, Natasha Chrispin

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Written from the viewpoint of the year 2050, this Article discusses the clash between legal ethics and the technological revolution of the early twenty-first century. As a result of ethics rules being applied to new technologies in ways never contemplated under traditional circumstances, lawyers had to be overly cautious when they used the Internet to correspond with or seek out clients, or otherwise promote their legal services. The lesson learned is that the legal community should reflect on the harm caused by over zealous regulation and take a more reasoned approach to the use of technology for the benefit of …

The Challenges Of Calculating The Benefits Of Providing Access To Legal Services, J. J. Prescott

Articles

In this invited essay, I explore how policymakers and other public-interested actors have empirically calculated the benefits of providing low-income access to civil legal services in the past, and how they might improve upon existing methods going forward. My argument proceeds in five parts. First, I briefly explain the optimal approach to allocating public funds from a welfare economics perspective. Second, I introduce the challenges of valuing “benefits” in the context of the public provision of legal services. Third, I summarize and critique existing attempts to quantify the benefits of and need for legal services funding. Specifically, I review, criticize, …

Delivery Of Legal Services To Children In The Boston Area, Tamar Ezer

Articles

No abstract provided.

Law As Largess: Shifting Paradigms Of Law For The Poor, Deborah M. Weissman

Deborah M. Weissman

The article examines the tension between the principles of the Rule of Law and cultural norms of self-sufficiency. It begins by reviewing the principles of the Rule of Law as an ideal, the pursuit of which has led to historical efforts to meet the legal needs of the poor. It then examines recent legal events including federal statutory changes, three Supreme Court cases, and a federal circuit court case which have limited legal resources for those who cannot pay. The article then examines these developments in the context of a sea-change in the political environment of the nation, coinciding with …

Justice For Interests Of The Poor: The Problem Of Navigating The System Without Counsel, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

No abstract provided.

Attorney Referral For Medical Treatment: A Wolf In Disguise., Martin J. Phipps

St. Mary's Law Journal

Texas attorneys should be obligated to disclose whether they referred their client to a pre-selected physician. Plaintiff attorneys, however, have been allowed to withhold this information from the court arguing the information is privileged. The practice of using a pre-selected physician is unethical and unfairly prejudicial. If the attorney and physician have an agreement, the attorney is likely to send numerous clients to that specific physician in order to receive a discount. The physician in turn is likely to recommend medically unnecessary procedures in order to inflate money damages. Therefore, in order to prevent potential abuse between the attorney-physician relationship, …

Learning And Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services By Law Students, David L. Chambers, Cynthia F. Adcock

Articles

All lawyers' codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools …

Pro Bono Service At The William S. Boyd School Of Law, Mary E. Berkheiser, Christine Smith

Scholarly Works

The mission of the William S. Boyd School of Law is to serve Nevada, and the legal and academic communities by developing and maintaining an innovative educational program that will train ethical and effective lawyers and leaders for Nevada and for the legal profession. To put the school’s mission in motion, we have begun by stressing community service, professionalism and the roles, responsibilities, skills and values of lawyers, and by involving students and faculty in community service projects in ways that will benefit our state.

Transitional Legal Practice And Professional Ideology, Bryant G. Garth

Michigan Journal of International Law

This essay assumes that there are three other reasons for studying transnational legal practice. First, such a study provides a way to explore some of the dilemmas that we often overlook about our domestic legal system. In both the domestic and transnational legal settings we are uncomfortable with the idea of law as "merely a business"; troubled by the invasion of "legality" into domains that once had seemed immune from state regulation; wary of the expense of "mega" law and litigation; reticent about a "total justice" which is expected to compensate individual victims of every unpleasant social accident; and nervous …

Yellow Pages Legal Ads In Texas: The Complexities Of Dr 2-101(B) & (And) (C)., Vincent Robert Johnson

St. Mary's Law Journal

This Article explains how attorneys can avoid private reprimands for advertisements in the Yellow Pages pursuant to subsection (B) and (C) of the Texas Code of Professional Responsibility Disciplinary Rule 2-101, given there is no scholarship or precedent. Subsection (B) requires an advertisement to include the name of a lawyer who is licensed to practice law in Texas, who will be responsible for performing the legal service, and the areas of law in which they practice. Subsection (C) requires detailed statements be included concerning whether the individuals named in compliance with subsection (B) are certified with the Texas Board of …

An Assessment Of Alternative Strategies For Increasing Access To Legal Services, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Since the late 1930s, lawyers have argued that their services are not used to the fullest advantage by a large segment of the population. More recently, other concerned groups such as trade unions and consumer organizations also have become convinced that there is an underutilization of lawyers' services, and that it is important to increase access to such services. As a result, attempts have been made to develop alternatives to the traditional methods of providing legal services that to date have proved inadequate in meeting the legal needs of the public. Legal clinics have proliferated, prepaid legal services plans have …