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Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Selected Works

2012

Professional responsibility

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Law

Mindfulness & Professional Responsibility -- A Guidebook For Incorporating Mindfulness Into The Law School Curriculum, Jan Jacobowitz, Scott Rogers Jul 2012

Mindfulness & Professional Responsibility -- A Guidebook For Incorporating Mindfulness Into The Law School Curriculum, Jan Jacobowitz, Scott Rogers

Jan L Jacobowitz

In Mindfulness & Professional Responsibility—A Guidebook for Integrating Mindfulness into the Law School Curriculum, Scott Rogers and Jan Jacobowitz share with readers their methodology for weaving together mindfulness and professional responsibility in the classroom. Readers are offered a glimpse into their popular University of Miami School of Law course, Mindful Ethics: Professional Responsibility for Lawyers in the Digital Age, and its creative curriculum that draws upon the application of traditional professional responsibility issues in the context of social media. Intended to introduce teachers to mindfulness practices and offer a method of integrating it into their classrooms, the book’s largest section …


Let's Put Ourselves Out Of Business: On Respect, Responsibility, And Dialogue In Dispute Resolution, Jonathan R. Cohen May 2012

Let's Put Ourselves Out Of Business: On Respect, Responsibility, And Dialogue In Dispute Resolution, Jonathan R. Cohen

Jonathan R. Cohen

This Essay works in two steps. I want to daydream with you about the future, or what I hope will someday be the future, of our dispute resolution movement. I want to then use these imaginings to reflect upon where we are today. I want to suggest something that may at first seem odd: Our ultimate goal should be to put ourselves, or virtually put ourselves, out of business. Eventually, I hope the time will come when we live in a society where the expert services of dispute resolution professionals, including not only lawyers and judges but also mediators and …


The Culture Of Legal Denial, Jonathan R. Cohen May 2012

The Culture Of Legal Denial, Jonathan R. Cohen

Jonathan R. Cohen

The goals of this essay are twofold. The first is to examine critically the practice of lawyers assisting clients in denying harms they commit and suggest some ways of changing that practice. Lawyers commonly presume that their clients' interests are best served by denial. Yet such a presumption is not warranted. Given the moral, psychological, relational, and sometimes even economic risks of denial to the injurer, lawyers should consider discussing responsibility taking more often with clients. The second is to explore several structural or systemic factors that may reinforce the practice of denial seen day in and day out within …


When People Are The Means: Negotiating With Respect, Jonathan R. Cohen May 2012

When People Are The Means: Negotiating With Respect, Jonathan R. Cohen

Jonathan R. Cohen

Most scholarship on negotiation ethics has focused on the topics of deception and disclosure. In this Article, I argue for considering a related, but distinct, ethical domain within negotiation ethics. That domain is the ethics of orientation. In contrast to most forms of human interaction, a clear purpose of negotiation is to get the other party to take an action on one's behalf, or at least to explore that possibility. This gives rise to a core ethical tension in negotiation that I call the object-subject tension: how does one reconcile the fact that the other party is a potential means …


The Immorality Of Denial, Jonathan R. Cohen May 2012

The Immorality Of Denial, Jonathan R. Cohen

Jonathan R. Cohen

This article is the first of a two-part series critically examining the role of lawyers in assisting clients in denying responsibility for harms they have caused. If a person injures another, the moral response is for the injurer actively to take responsibility for what he has done. In contrast, the common practice within our legal culture is for injurers to deny responsibility for harms they commit. The immoral, in other words, has become the legally normal. In this Article, Professor Cohen analyzes the moral foundations of responsibility-taking. He also explores the moral, psychological, and spiritual risks to injurers who knowingly …


What Is A Lawyer? A Reconstruction Of The Lawyer As An Officer Of The Court, Deborah Hussey Freeland Dec 2011

What Is A Lawyer? A Reconstruction Of The Lawyer As An Officer Of The Court, Deborah Hussey Freeland

Deborah M. Hussey Freeland

This paper engages with the central question in legal ethics concerning the lawyer's role, analyzing this fundamental question in terms of professional identity. Literature in this debate frames the lawyer either as a professional who exists entirely to serve her client (the "standard conception"), or as a professional whose primary duties are to the legal system. I reposit and examine the lawyer's professional identity as an officer of the court--an identity marginalized by those who favor the standard conception--noting that the phrase was coined to draw attention to a supplanting threat to legal professionalism. Providing a uniquely detailed examination of …


Rehabilitating Lawyers: Perceptions Of Deviance And Its Cures In The Lawyer Reinstatement Process, Bruce A. Green, Jane Moriarty Dec 2011

Rehabilitating Lawyers: Perceptions Of Deviance And Its Cures In The Lawyer Reinstatement Process, Bruce A. Green, Jane Moriarty

Jane Campbell Moriarty

State courts’ approach to lawyer admissions and discipline has not changed fundamentally in the past century. Courts still place faith in the idea that “moral character” is a stable trait that reliably predicts whether an individual will be honest in any given situation. Although research in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychiatry, research psychology, and behavioral economics (collectively “cognitive and social science”) has influenced prevailing concepts of personality and trustworthiness, courts to date have not considered whether they might change or refine their approach to “moral character” in light of scientific insights. This Article examines whether courts should reevaluate how they decide …