Law Commons^™

Playing With Fire: The Science Of Confronting Adverse Material In Legal Advocacy, Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

The Article seeks to use the science to determine what treatment of adverse information is most beneficial to the client's position. A careful study of the science reveals that, overall, it is advantageous for the advocate to volunteer negative information and rebut it early, and that a direct and in-depth confrontation of negative information is generally more effective than an indirect and cursory treatment.

A close look at the finer points of the data, however, reveals that the question of disclosure is a complicated one. Therefore, legal advocates should learn about the research findings and the theories underlying the research …

Beyond Cardboard Clients In Legal Ethics, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

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 …

The Human Dignity Of Clients, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

This essay reviews David Luban's forthcoming book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. At the heart of this new book is an argument that interactions between lawyers and clients ought to be at the center of jurisprudential inquiry. Pointing out that most cases do not go to trial and that much transactional work occurs outside the litigation context, he argues that law's defining moments occur when a "client sketches out a problem and a lawyer tenders advice," rather than when a judge decides a litigant's case. This review essay examines how Luban might elaborate a new "jurisprudence of lawyering" by examining …

(Almost) Everything We Learned About Pleasing Bankruptcy Judges, We Learned In Kindergarten, Nancy B. Rapoport, Roland Bernier Iii

Scholarly Works

In this essay, we demonstrate that most ethics violations (at least the ones that irritate bankruptcy judges) are also violations of simple rules of behavior that people should have learned in kindergarten.