Law Commons^™

Tribute To John Pickering, Raymond C. Clevenger

Michigan Law Review

This is my homage to John. I ask you to summon up in your imagination today a grand circus, a sort of Cirque du Soleil of lawyers: full of shining talents performing legal feats of wonder, but presided over by a grand ringmaster. This ringmaster knows his performers very well. He knows how to train and stroke them to high achievement. He knows how to groom the younger workers. He can keep his stars in check. He knows when to sit back with a smile, letting his charges perform and claim the applause, even when the applause rightfully belongs to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Timothy B. Dyk

Michigan Law Review

It is very appropriate that we are here today to honor John Pickering, who, for more than five decades, was a leading member of our bar. I first met John when I joined the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in 1964, two years after it was founded. The three founding fathers of the firm were formidable figures, particularly to a young lawyer, and John Pickering was no exception. I do not mean that John was unkind. He was the kindest of people. But there was something particularly serious about him, and I always wondered whether that had to …

Tribute To John Pickering, Marcia Greenberger

Michigan Law Review

This room is filled with many women lawyers. All of us loved John Pickering and are in his debt, but we are only a small number of those who do. For many decades, John guided young, and I must admit not so young, women lawyers to positions where they could stand up for their own rights and the rights of others. He worked with us to champion the causes that matter most to women and their families. John used his great stature and the enormous respect that he garnered to open doors for women to leadership positions in the bar, …

Tribute To John Pickering, Elaine R. Jones

Michigan Law Review

This talented, persuasive, committed lawyer-leader, John Pickering, had several abiding personal and professional interests, two of which enhanced my life directly, and most of which enhanced my life indirectly. The first was the great personal interest he took in lawyers younger than himself, and the second was his passion about civil rights and combating the effects of racial discrimination.

Tribute To John Pickering, Noël Anketell Kramer

Michigan Law Review

I knew John Pickering from the time that I was a second-year law student- just a few years ago, it seems-when he and Sally Katzen recruited me to join what was then the small firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. We remained friends thereafter, sharing among other interests an avid loyalty to the University of Michigan.

Tribute To John Pickering, Esther Lardent

Michigan Law Review

I want to talk to you about the lessons that so many of us have learned from John, and the qualities that made him so memorable and so extraordinary. The first was his unerring ability to know what was right. Now, many of us want to do right, but John always knew what the right thing was. Despite growing up in a time and place where women and people of color were not valued, where the homeless, the despised, the poor, and the disadvantaged were not considered worthy, John cared deeply about doing right by all of these people.

Tribute To John Pickering, James Robertson

Michigan Law Review

John Pickering was so much involved with both the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and with the bar of this city. It would take too long to recite all of the ways in which John supported and helped our Court and the Court of Appeals, but I will note that, in every one of the ten years since I have been on this bench, John has been invited to speak at the Law Clerks Luncheon Series. That is a big deal. The law clerks …

Tribute To John Pickering, Stanley L. Temko

Michigan Law Review

John was a close friend and a professional colleague of mine for more than fifty years, and he was admired by and very close to a number of members of our firm. Everyone knows his substantial contributions as a lawyer. I will just mention a couple.

The Unfulfilled Promise Of The Constitution In Executive Hands, Cornelia T.L. Pillard

Michigan Law Review

Many leading constitutional scholars now argue for greater reliance on the political branches to supplement or even supplant judicial enforcement of the Constitution. Responding to our national preoccupation with the judiciary as the mechanism of constitutional enforcement, these scholars stress that the executive and legislature, too, bear responsibility to think about the Constitution for themselves and to take steps to fulfill the Constitution's promise. Joining a debate that goes back at least as far as Marbury v. Madison, current scholars seek to reawaken the political branches to their constitutional potential, and urge the Supreme Court to leave the other …

The Death Of The Living Will, Carl E. Schneider, Angela Fagerlin

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Enough. The living will has failed, and it is time to say so.

We should have known it would fail: A notable but neglected psychological literature always provided arresting reasons to expect the policy of living wills to misfire. Given their alluring potential, perhaps they were worth trying. But a crescendoing empirical literature and persistent clinical disappointments reveal that the rewards of the campaign to promote living wills do not justify its costs.

Events

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

No abstract provided.

The Higher Calling: Regulation Of Lawyers Post-Enron, Keith R. Fisher

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article discusses some of the inadequacies in the current ethical regulation of the legal system and proposes a new approach to crafting and contextualizing rules of legal ethics. The proliferation of specialties and subspecialties in law practice, together with the inadequacies of prevailing ethics regulation and the vagaries of ethics rules formulations from state to state have not served either the public or the legal profession well. Manipulation, motivated by politics and self-interest, of the ideology of the organized bar to adhere to ethical rules predicated on an antiquated and unrealistic model of a unified legal profession has likewise …

Evidence? Or Emotional Fuel?, Robert E. Precht

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following excerpt is from Defending Mohammad: Justice on Trial (Cornell University Press, 2003), by Robert E. Precht, and appears here with permission of Cornell University Press. The excerpt is from Chapter 8, "Relevance and Prejudice." The book is based on the author's experience as public defender for Mohammad Salameh, the lead suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

A Deadly Dilemma: Choices By Attorneys Representing "Innocent" Capital Defendants, Welsh S. White

Michigan Law Review

A lawyer who represents a capital defendant with a strong innocence claim must allocate her resources between the separate guilt and penalty phases of the capital case. Expending resources in preparation for a penalty trial may result in less attention to securing the acquittal on the capital charge at the guilt trial that would make the penalty phase moot. But focusing primarily on proving the defendant's innocence at the guilt trial means less preparation in the case of a guilty verdict. Once a defendant is convicted of a capital offense, a lawyer must also make strategic decisions about the penalty …

Satirical Legal Studies: From The Legists To The Lizard, Peter Goodrich

Michigan Law Review

In Part I, I expand on the distinction between the Horatian and the Menippean forms of satire and then suggest that a similarly bold division can be used to map satirical legal studies. In support of that argument, I use the example of the earliest surviving satirical legal poem within the Western tradition. My analysis of this exemplary satirical legal artifact delineates four principal modes of legal satire that will organize the ensuing discussion of more contemporary examples of the genre. In Part II, I will address the currently popular and yet somewhat novel mode of ad hominem or nominate …

Main Street Multidisciplinary Practice Firms: Laboratories For The Future, Susan Poser

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article examines the debate over multidisciplinary practice in the wake of the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen. Part I addresses the history of the scholarly debate about multidisciplinary practice in the United States. It discusses the focus on large multidisciplinary firms, feared threats to independent professional judgment, and the current rule concerning lawyers and multidisciplinary practice.

Part II examines the reasons for allowing multidisciplinary practice. The author argues that client demand, lawyer demand, and policy reasons all provide valid reasons for permitting "one-stop" shopping. Part I also discusses existing forms of multidisciplinary practice. The author argues that the …

Retrying Race, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

This Essay investigates the renewed prosecution of long-dormant criminal and civil rights cases of white-on-black racial violence arising out of the 1950s and 1960s. The study is part of an ongoing project on race, lawyers, and ethics within the criminal-justice system. Framed by this larger project, the Essay explores the normative and sociolegal meaning of that resurgent prosecution. My hope in pursuing this inquiry is to better understand, and perhaps begin to refashion, the prosecutor's redemptive role in cases of racial violence. Both descriptive and prescriptive in nature, the inquiry addresses race in relation to law and community. Grappling with …

Resolving The Title Vii Partner-Employee Debate, Kristin Nicole Johnson

Michigan Law Review

In January of 2001, a New York court issued an order affirming a plaintiff's ability to bring suit against a law firm partnership for discriminatory acts that occurred during her tenure as an associate at the firm. The plaintiff, Stacy Ballen-Stier, joined Hahn & Hessen, L.L.P. as an associate and, on January 1, 1997, the firm invited her to join the partnership. According to Ms. Ballen-Stier's complaint, the words and actions of a fellow partner, Mr. Blejwas, created a hostile and abusive work environment and continued to plague her "even when [she] was away from the office." Ms. Ballen-Stier alleged …

A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Citizens sue industries for tort injuries. That is familiar. Governments sue the same industries for costs suffered in ameliorating or preventing those injuries. That is unfamiliar. This new pattern of litigation and settlement inherently puts the government in competition with its citizens.

A Footnote For Jack Dawson, James J. White, David A. Peters

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

In the jointly-authored section below, "I" refers to Professor James J. White and "we" refers to White and co-author David A. Peters.

Jack Dawson, known to many at Michigan as Black Jack, taught at the Law School from 1927 to 1958. Much of his work was published in the Michigan Law Review, where he served as a student editor during the 1923-24 academic year. We revisit his work and provide a footnote to his elegant writing on mistake and supervening events.

In Part 1, we talk a little about Jack the man. In Part II, we recite the nature …

How Well Does The Wto Settle Disputes?, Susan Esserman, Robert L. Howse

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Last fall, a judicial panel of the WorldTrade Organization (WTO) issued a controversial ruling in a high-stakes corporate tax dispute between the United States and the European Union. Paying scant attention to the complexities of the case, the panel authorized Brussels to implement retaliatory sanction of $4 billion - an unprecedented sum - against Washington. Notably, around the same time the United States and its European allies were also making headlines with another fierce legal battle: over the authority of the International Criminal Court to prosecute American soldiers for alleged misdeeds committed abroad.

Features: Taking Globalization Seriously: Michigan Breaks New Ground By Requiring The Study Of Transnational Law, Mathias Reimann

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

Taking globalization seriously: Michigan breaks new ground by requiring the study of transnational law. The faculty acted on the conviction that a fundamental understanding of how law works in the global context must be part of every lawyer's toolkit.

Lawyers And Domestic Violence: Raising The Standard Of Practice, John M. Burman

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Lawyers and judges should be the vanguard of those working to end domestic violence and mitigate its effects, yet they are not. This article is an attempt to change that. It strives to shed some light on the profound effect domestic violence has on law and law practice, as well as the profound effect lawyers and the legal system can have on domestic violence. Part II of this article demonstrates the extent and pervasiveness of domestic violence. Part III describes how domestic violence will affect a lawyer's practice. Part IV provides guidance on what a lawyer should do to determine …

Does Information And Agreement Equal Informed Consent?, Carl E. Schneider, Michael H. Farrell

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is based on a talk delivered last summer in England and on the chapter "Information, Decisions, and the Limits of Informed Consent," in (Michael Freeman and Andrew D. E. Lewis, eds.) Law and Medicine: Current Legal Issues 2000, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press, 2000). This version appears with permission of the publisher.

For many years, a principal labor of bioethics has been to find a way of confiding medical decisions to patients and not to doctors. The foremost mechanism for doing so has been the doctrine of informed consent. Anxious as bioethicists and courts have been to …

Fit And Functional In Legal Ethics: Developing A Code Of Conduct For International Arbitration, Catherine A. Rogers

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this Article, the author develops a methodology for prescribing the normative content of a code of ethics for international arbitration, and in a forthcoming companion article, integrated mechanisms for making those norms both binding and enforceable are proposed. In making these proposals, the author rejects the classical conception of legal ethics as a purely deontological product derived from first principles. This Article argues, instead, that ethics derive from the inter-relational functional role of advocates in an adjudicatory system, and that ethical regulation must correlate with the structural operations of the system. The fit between ethics and function, the author …

No Black Names On The Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination And The South African Legal Profession, Lisa R. Pruitt

Michigan Journal of International Law

Although there have long been black lawyers in South Africa, during apartheid only a handful joined the ranks of the country's large commercial firms. Now, in the post-apartheid period, these firms are keenly aware of a range of economic and political incentives to hire black attorneys, and most are doing so at a record pace. Very few black attorneys, however, are enduring the path to partnership in these firms. Based on more than seventy-five interviews conducted in South Africa in 1999 and 2000, this Article both documents and critically examines the reasons for black attrition. While firms' incentives to integrate …

Credit Cards In The United States And Japan, Ronald J. Mann

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is excerpted from a paper prepared during fall 2000 during the author's stay in Tokyo as a visiting scholar at the Institutefor Monetary and Economic Studies at the Bank of Japan.

One of the most important aspects of consumer payment systems in the United States is the widespread use of credit cards. American consumers use credit cards to pay for about one-fifth of their purchases each year. That pattern of use is not universal.

A Suggestion On Suggestion, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci

Law Quadrangle (formerly Law Quad Notes)

The following essay is adapted from "The Suggestibility of Children: Scientific Research and Legal Implication" (86.1 Cornell Law Review 33-108 [November 2000]) and appears here with permission of the publisher.

The vulnerabilities of young children have far-reaching implications for the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Arguably, these vulnerabilities may affect how an investigator should interview the child; whether her hearsay statements should be admitted; whether expert evidence concerning her vulnerability should be admitted; and whether a criminal conviction based principally on her testimony should be allowed.

Foreword: The Question Of Process, J. Harvie Wilkinson Iii

Michigan Law Review

Many in the legal profession have abandoned the great questions of legal process. This is too bad. How a decision is reached can be as important as what the decision is. In an increasingly diverse country with many competing visions of the good, it is critical for law to aspire to agreement on process - a task both more achievable than agreement on substance and more suited to our profession than waving the banners of ideological truth. By process, I mean the institutional routes by which we in America reach our most crucial decisions. In other words, process is our …

Zen And The Art Of Jursiprudence, Matthew K. Roskoski

Michigan Law Review

Lawyer bashing is by no means a remarkable phenomenon. It was not remarkable when Shakespeare wrote, "[t]he first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," and it's not remarkable today. Paul Campos, however, has written a particularly readable example, blending venerable Western lawyer-bashing and pop psychology with unsystematic invocations of Eastern religion. Jurismania is named after Campos's theory that the American legal system has a lot in common with a person suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder, an addiction to law that does neither the patient nor those around him much good. In Jurismania, Campos criticizes our insistence on regulating …