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Not Just Key Numbers And Keywords Anymore: How User Interface Design Affects Legal Research, Julie M. Jones
Not Just Key Numbers And Keywords Anymore: How User Interface Design Affects Legal Research, Julie M. Jones
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Legal research is one of the foundational skills for the practice of law. Yet law school graduates are frequently admitted to the bar without adequate competence in this area. Applying both information-foraging theory and current standards for optimal web design, Ms. Jones considers, through a heuristic analysis, whether the user interfaces of Westlaw and LexisNexis help or hinder the process of legal research and the development of effective research skills.
Lawyers As Quasi-Public Actors, W. Bradley Wendel
Lawyers As Quasi-Public Actors, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This paper was written for a panel on access to justice at the 100th anniversary conference of the Law Society of Alberta, Canada. In it I argue that the debate over access to justice, which in the United States generally means pro bono representation provided by individual lawyers, cannot be divorced from broader theoretical debates about the lawyer's role. My claim is that lawyers are quasi-public actors, in the sense that they have some responsibility to aim directly at justice in their representation of clients, and cannot rely only on indirect strategies to ensure that justice is served. The argument …
Personal Integrity And The Conflict Between Ordinary And Institutional Values, W. Bradley Wendel
Personal Integrity And The Conflict Between Ordinary And Institutional Values, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Values, which give us reasons for acting in certain ways, may be properties of both natural, pre-institutional states of affairs and relations among persons, as well as states of affairs and relations among persons that are constituted and regulated by social and political institutions. We can call these ordinary moral values and institutional values, respectively. The fundamental issue in legal ethics is often represented as a conflict between ordinary moral values and institutional values. However, another conflict which has not been well explored in the legal ethics literature is between agent-neutral institutional values and agent-relative reasons that arise from the …
Valuing The Waiver: The Real Beauty Of Ex Ante Over Ex Post, Robert C. Hockett
Valuing The Waiver: The Real Beauty Of Ex Ante Over Ex Post, Robert C. Hockett
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Irony abounds in connection with demands and proposals made, in the wake of the Enron, Worldcom, and other corporate scandals, that firms be required or encouraged to waive attorney-client privilege. Justice Department officials speak to the importance of "getting at the truth" as trumping firms' interest in confidential internal communications as a prerequisite to compliance with law. They do so notwithstanding their own contrary arguments made on behalf of the secretive Bush administration that employs them. Corporate officers, for their part, speak as though Ralph Nader were the Attorney General when they denounce waiver proposals. They do so notwithstanding the …
Institutional And Individual Justification In Legal Ethics: The Problem Of Client Selection, W. Bradley Wendel
Institutional And Individual Justification In Legal Ethics: The Problem Of Client Selection, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Monroe Freedman is well known as a proponent of the "standard conception" of legal ethics - that is, that a lawyer cannot be criticized in moral terms for actions taken in a representative capacity. Surprisingly, however, Freedman has argued that client selection is a decision for which a lawyer may be required to provide a justification in ordinary moral terms. This apparent inconsistency reveals a conceptual distinction in normative ethical theory, which is often blurred, between justifying a practice (in this case, the legal system or some specialized practice such as criminal defense) and justifying an action falling within the …