Law Commons^™

Gift Giving To Biobanks, Leonard H. Glantz, Patricia Roche, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

We agree with Mark Rothstein's goal of giving tissue donors control over their donated tissues. But we think using the research model as the basis for attaining this goal, while widely employed and accepted, should be abandoned.

The research regulations were originally adopted to deal with interventions on living human beings, not on the tissue of human beings. The Nuremberg Code (a reaction to concentration camp experiments), the Willowbrook experiment, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the other examples of the abuse of research subjects that provided the rationale for regulating research on human subjects clearly had nothing to do with …

It's Not Funny: Creating A Professional Culture Of Pro Bono Commitment, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Colbert challenges the popular view that regards lawyers as selfish, greedy and uncaring to the legal needs of the outside community. In his article, he recognizes that the lawyers with whom he is familiar are fulfilling the lawyer’s ethical obligation of engaging in pro bono service and “provid[ing] legal services to those unable to pay,” while also embracing the language in the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that refers to the attorney “as a public citizen who has a special responsibility to the quality of justice.” Professor Colbert asks colleagues in the legal academy whether they …

The Madoff Scandal, Market Regulatory Failure And The Business Education Of Lawyers, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This essay suggests that a deficiency in legal education is a contributing cause of the regulatory failure. The most scandalous malfeasance of this new era, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, evinces the failure of improperly trained lawyers and regulators. It also calls into question whether the prevailing regulatory philosophy of disclosure of disclosure is sufficient in a complex market. This essay answers an important question underlying these considerations: What can legal education do to better train business lawyers and regulators for a market that is becoming more complex? One answer, it suggests, is a simple one: law schools should teach a …

Navigating The Murky Waters Of Untruth In Negotiation: Lessons For Ethical Lawyers, Deborah A. Schmedemann

Faculty Scholarship

This article answers the following questions: What does the law-both general principles applicable to truthfulness in negotiation and professional responsibility rules- say about this dilemma? What do we know about the practice of truthfulness in lawyer negotiations? What have social scientists learned about deception in negotiations over the last few decades? Finally, what lessons can be drawn for lawyers seeking to behave ethically, as well as for those interested in assisting lawyers navigate the “murky waters of untruth?

Beyond Cardboard Clients In Legal Ethics, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that the construction of cardboard clients in legal ethics has disserved legal ethics by obscuring what is arguably a more central problem of legal professionalism: the problem of legal objectification. The problem of legal objectification is the tendency of lawyers to "issue-spot" their clients as they would the facts on a blue-book exam, overemphasizing the clients' legal interests and minimizing or ignoring the other cares, commitments, relationships, reputations and values that constitute the objectives clients bring to legal representation. This Article proposes an alternative ideal of legal professionalism for "three-dimensional clients" based on helping clients articulate and …

In Defense Of Appearances: What Caperton V. Massey Should Have Said, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

In June of 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the first time that an elected judge must recuse himself from a case that involves a major campaign contributor. In Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., a coal company had been hit with a $50 million jury verdict. While appealing this verdict, the company's CEO, Don Blankenship, spent $3 million to help a challenger, Brent Benjamin, who had no judicial experience, defeat the incumbent, West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw. Blankenship funded political attack ads by a political organization (And for the Sake of the Kids) that …

You Do Have To Keep Your Promises: A Disgorgement Theory Of Contract Remedies, Steve Thel, Peter Siegelman

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law is generally understood to require no more of a person who breaches a contract than to give the injured promisee the "benefit of the bargain." The law is thus assumed to permit a promise-breaker to keep any profit remaining from breach, after putting the victim in the position he would have been in had the promise been performed. This conventional description is radically wrong: across a wide range of circumstances, standard contract doctrines actually do require people to keep their promises, or to disgorge their entire profit from breach if they do not. Rather than protecting the expectation …

It's Not My Problem? Wrong: Prosecutors Have An Important Ethical Role To Play, Rory K. Little

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Robinson Everett: The Citizen Lawyer Ideal Lives On, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

In this tribute to Professor Robinson O. Everett, Dean David Levi questions the view that the citizen-lawyer or lawyer-statesmen models are in decline. Tracing Professor Everett’s varied career, accomplishments, and commitments to individuals and institutions; Levi contends that Everett combined the lawyer's traditional focus on the individual with an overall dedication to the larger community. Everett was not just a model citizen; he was a lawyer-citizen. Levi contends that the survival of the lawyer-citizen and lawyer-statesmen models is a matter of choice and character. Nothing in the current structure of the legal economy places these models out of reach for …

A Tale Of Two Judges : A Judge Advocate’S Reflections On Judge Gonzales’S Apologia, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This is a response to - and reflection about - Judge Alberto Gonzales's essay in the Texas Tech Law Review entitled "Waging War Within the Constitution" 42 Tex. Tech. L. Rev. 843 (2010). It argues that national security law policy in an era of complex challenges is best designed when the expertise of the widest number of knowledgeable practictioners is brought to bear in a principled and fearless manner.

Lawyers In Character And Lawyers In Role, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

Legal ethicists have long been fascinated by the relationships between lawyers’ roles in an adversary system of justice and the character, attitudes, or dispositions that best suit the practice of law. Leonard Riskin’s scholarship has explored how lawyers’ practice of mindfulness can improve their legal practice, and his claim in this body of work – that the practice of mindfulness helps to develop the internalized trait of mindfulness – ties his scholarship to the work of legal ethicists who have endeavored to develop character-based theories of legal ethics. Riskin’s analysis of how lawyers might incorporate mindfulness into law practice also …

Role Differentiation And Lawyer's Ethics: A Critique Of Some Academic Perspectives, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Much recent academic discussion exaggerates the distance between plausible legal ethics and ordinary morality. This essay criticizes three prominent strands of discussion: one drawing on the moral philosophy of personal virtue, one drawing on legal philosophy, and a third drawing on utilitarianism of the law-and-economics variety. The essay uses as a central reference point the "Mistake-of-Law" scenario in which a lawyer must decide whether to rescue an opposing party from the unjust consequences of his own lawyer's error I argue that academic efforts to shore up the professional inclination against rescue are not plausible. I conclude by recommending an older …