Law Commons^™

The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Two forms of labor’s capital—union funds and public pension funds—have profoundly reshaped the corporate world. They have successfully advocated for shareholder empowerment initiatives like proxy access, declassified boards, majority voting, say on pay, private fund registration, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. They have also served as lead plaintiffs in forty percent of federal securities fraud and Delaware deal class actions. Today, much-discussed reforms like revised shareholder proposal rules and mandatory arbitration threaten two of the main channels by which these shareholders have exercised power. But labor’s capital faces its greatest, even existential, threats from outside corporate law. This Essay addresses …

The Virtue Of Vulnerability: Mindfulness And Well-Being In Law Schools And The Legal Profession, Nathalie Martin

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role of vulnerability in transforming individual relationships, particularly the attorney-client relationship. In this essay, Martin argues that broadening our expressions can improve our client relations and decrease the likelihood that when that inevitable mistake occurs, we will be sued for it. Also, based upon virtue ethics, that practicing vulnerability is also virtuous and thus worthwhile in and of itself.

This essay starts by describing the traits people look for in lawyers as well as evidence that clients often feel that their lawyers are less than human. Then examines how legal education contributes to this problem by …

Online Legal Document Providers And The Public Interest: Using A Certification Approach To Balance Access To Justice And Public Protection, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

The Internet and electronic communications have revolutionized how consumers obtain legal information and assistance. The availability of legal forms and services has developed at lightning speed and countless consumers are using these forms, rather than consulting attorneys. At the same time, many regulators of the legal profession appear to be frozen in time. Some take the position that the provision of interactive forms amounts to the unauthorized practice of law and others question arrangements that appear to involve the sharing of legal fees with non-lawyers. Even for those interested in regulating the provision of on-line services, one complication to doing …

Assigned Counsel Mentoring Programs: Results And Lessons From Two Pilot Projects, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Working with a team of three subject matter experts, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association implemented and evaluated two pilot mentoring projects aimed at helping lawyers who serve as assigned counsel. This report discusses the program design, evaluation outcomes, and offers guidance through lessons learned for other jurisdictions interested in introducing assigned counsel mentoring programs. The author of the report was the principal investigator who evaluated the programs.

This project was supported by grant number 2015-AJ-BX-K043 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs to the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. The opinions, findings, and …

Fiduciary Constitutionalism: Implications For Self-Pardons And Non-Delegation, Ethan J. Lieb, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The idea that public servants hold their offices in trust for subject-beneficiaries and that a sovereign's exercise of its political power must be constrained by fiduciary standards-like the duties of loyalty and care-is not new. But scholars are collecting more and more evidence that the framers of the U.S. Constitution may have sought to constrain public power in ways that we would today call fiduciary. In this article, we explore some important legal conclusions that follow from fiduciary constitutionalism.

After developing some historical links between private fiduciary instruments and state and federal constitutions, we opine on what a fiduciary constitution …

The Lawyer As Superhero: How Marvel Comics' Daredevil Depicts The American Court System And Legal Practice, Louis Michael Rosen

Faculty Scholarship

This article will explore on the portrayal of lawyers and the legal system in Daredevil comic books, particularly issues published in the Twenty-First Century. Because the Daredevil movie and the first two seasons of the Netflix television series have already been examined from various legal perspectives in past articles, this piece will highlight legal storylines from the comics themselves. This exploration is important because writers of future Netflix seasons will surely draw story elements from the comics discussed here and will very likely adapt these exact stories, encouraging the larger television audience to seek out and read the original comics. …

Professionals, Politicos, And Crony Attorneys General: A Historical Sketch Of The U.S. Attorney General As A Case For Structural Independence, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

We assume that the nineteenth century was an era of patronage, and the twentieth century marked the rise of professionalization. But the Office of the Attorney General reveals an opposite pattern — a troubling rise of cronyism in the DOJ from the early twentieth century.

This Article uses the rough categories of “professional,” “politico,” and “insider” or “crony,” based on each attorney general's background and how he or she rose to the office (rather than based upon their performance in the office.) Most AGs in the nineteenth century were "politicos" (major established political figures) or "professionals" (experienced lawyers relatively separate …

Hardball Vs. Beanball: Identifying Fundamentally Antidemocratic Tactics, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The “constitutional hardball” metaphor used by legal scholars and political scientists illuminates an important phenomenon in American politics, but it obscures a crisis in American democracy. In baseball, hardball encompasses legitimate tactics: pitching inside to brush a batter back but not injure, hard slides, hard tags. Baseball fans celebrate hardball. Many of the constitutional hardball maneuvers previously identified by scholars have been legitimate, if aggressive, constitutional political moves. But the label “hardball” has been interpreted too broadly to include illegitimate, fundamentally undemocratic tactics. I suggest a different baseball metaphor for such tactics: beanball, pitches meant to injure and knock out …

Rise Of The Robot Lawyers?, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of artificial intelligence has provoked considerable speculation about the future of the American workforce, including highly educated professionals such as lawyers and doctors. Although most commentators are alarmed by the prospect of intelligent machines displacing millions of workers, this is not so with respect to the legal sector. Media accounts and some legal scholars envision a future where intelligent machines perform the bulk of legal work, and legal services are less expensive and more accessible. This future is purportedly at hand as lawyers struggle to compete with technologically savvy alternative legal service providers.

This Article challenges the notion …

Dispute Resolution Neutrals' Ethical Obligation To Support Measured Transparency, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

In 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued proposed rules that would have brought substantial transparency to mandatory pre-dispute consumer arbitration. In particular, the CFPB proposed to require regulated providers of financial products and services to report to the CFPB regarding their use and the outcomes of arbitrations conducted pursuant to arbitration clauses, and further, the CFPB proposed to make such information public (with appropriate redactions). Although Congress and the President ultimately annulled the CFPB’s proposed rule, its introduction revealed the need for dispute resolution neutrals to support bringing “measured transparency” to private dispute resolution. To place the CFPB’s …

Mandatory Legal Malpractice Insurance: Exposing Lawyers' Blind Spots, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

The legal landscape for lawyers’ professional liability in the United States is changing. In 2018, Idaho implemented a new rule requiring that lawyers carry legal malpractice insurance. The adoption of the Idaho rule was the first move in forty years by a state to require legal malpractice insurance since Oregon mandated lawyer participation in a malpractice insurance regime. Over the last two years, a few states have considered whether their jurisdictions should join Oregon and Idaho in requiring malpractice insurance for lawyers in private practice. To help inform the discussion, the article examines different positions taken in the debate on …

Florida Legal Malpractice Law: Commentary And Forms, Robert Jarvis

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Outsized Influence Of The Fcpa?, Veronica Root Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

The current power and influence of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) is really quite remarkable when one considers the statute was largely ignored for its first twenty-five years of existence. This statute, meant to reign in corruption by United States companies doing business abroad; has generated billions of dollars in revenue for the United States government; prompted the development of law firm practice groups and law school courses; become the subject of numerous scholarly articles; and has, arguably, made anti-bribery efforts the highest of priorities for multinational corporations engaged in robust compliance efforts. Corporations, scholars, and the public would …

Don't Call Me Sweetheart: Why The Aba's New Rule Addressing Harrassment And Discrimination Is So Important For Women Working In The Legal Profession Today, Kristy D'Angelo-Corker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

When Less Is More: The Limitless Potential Of Limited Scope Representation To Increase Access To Justice For Low- To Moderate-Income Individuals, Kristy D'Angelo-Corker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professional Judgment In An Era Of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Though artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and education now accomplishes diverse tasks, there are two features that tend to unite the information processing behind efforts to substitute it for professionals in these fields: reductionism and functionalism. True believers in substitutive automation tend to model work in human services by reducing the professional role to a set of behaviors initiated by some stimulus, which are intended to accomplish some predetermined goal, or maximize some measure of well-being. However, true professional judgment hinges on a way of knowing the world that is at odds with the epistemology of substitutive automation. Instead of …

Regulating Prosecutors’ Courtroom Misconduct, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Trial prosecutors’ visible misbehavior, such as improper questioning of witnesses and improper jury arguments, may not seem momentous. Sometimes, the improprieties are simply the product of poor training or overenthusiasm. In many cases, they pass unremarked. As the Chicago Eight trial illustrated, trial prosecutors’ improprieties may also be overshadowed by the excesses of other trial participants—the witnesses, the defendants, the defense lawyers, or even the trial judge. And when noticed, prosecutors’ trial misbehavior can ordinarily be remedied, and then restrained, by a capable trial judge. It is little wonder that disciplinary authorities, having bigger fish to fry, are virtually indifferent …

Us Military Medical Ethics In The War On Terror, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

Military medical ethics has been challenged by the post-11 September 2001 ‘War on Terror’. Two recurrent questions are whether military physicians are officers first or physicians first, and whether military physicians need a separate code of ethics. In this article, we focus on how the War on Terror has affected the way we have addressed these questions since 2001. Two examples frame this discussion: the use of military physicians to force-feed hunger strikers held in Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and the uncertain fate of the Department of Defense’s report on ‘Ethical Guidelines and Practices for US Military …

A Common-Sense Defense Of Janus: Forthcoming Changes In The Public Sector, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

Many scholars and others have, for some time now, been calling attention to the alarming growth in post-employment and other benefits for unionized employees in the public sector. ¹⁷ A fairly well-understood phenomenon is thought to explain the inability of state and local governments to resist outsized demands from their public unions. As ¹⁸ Is and others ¹⁹ have argued, the central problem with public sector unions is that they find it easy to capture their employers (taxpayers) in ways that private sector unions cannot. The role played by often eager and feckless elected officials in this process has also …

The Three Ages Of Modern American Lawyering And The Current Crisis In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

During the first months of 2018, two short pieces on legal education were published. One reported on the results of a survey of college graduates, law school graduates, and holders of other advanced degrees. The study found that today’s law graduates were less likely than pre-recession counterparts to report that the J.D. degree was worth the cost and more likely to have second thoughts about the decision to go to law school. The findings prompted Aaron Taylor, executive director of the Access Lex Center for Legal Education Excellence, to conclude that there are “two distinct worlds of law graduates” made …