Law Commons^™

Chief Loophole Officer Or Chief Legal Officer: Inside Lehman Brothers—A Film Case Study About Corporate And Legal Ethics, Garrick Apollon

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article discusses the continuing legal education (CLE) visual advocacy documentary-style program, which Garrick Apollon (author of this Article) researched and developed. The case study for this CLE documentary-style program is the film Inside Lehman Brothers—a documentary film by Jennifer Deschamps which chronicles the story of the Lehman whistleblowers. The film presents Mathew Lee, former senior vice president overseeing Lehman’s global balance sheet; Oliver Budde, former in-house counsel (associate general counsel) of the Lehman Brothers; and the racialized female mid-tier manager whistleblowers, who all paid a steep price in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis, while many of the …

Reconceiving Ethics For Judicial Law Clerks, Gregory Bischoping

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Judicial law clerks hold a unique and critical position in our legal system. They play a central part in the functioning of the judiciary, oftentimes writing the first draft of their judge’s opinions and serving as their trusted researcher and sounding board. Moreover, they are privy to the many highly confidential processes and private information behind the important work of the judiciary. It stands to reason the comprehensive set of ethical duties that bind the world of lawyers and judges should also provide guidance for judicial law clerks. The most important among those ethics rules is a duty of confidentiality. …

Lawyers, Mistakes, And Moral Growth, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Vincent R. Johnson, professor at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, reviews The Man in the Ditch: A Redemption Story for Today by Dallas attorney Mike H. Bassett.

Untangling Attorney Retainers From Creditor Claims, Cassandra Burke Robertson, Jesse T. Wynn

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Clients will often use a retainer to secure an attorney’s representation. But clients in economic distress may have creditors that are eager to access the client’s funds in the attorney’s hands. Attorneys, clients, courts, and regulators have struggled to understand who has the best claim to such retainer funds. In this Article, we attempt to untangle the most common areas of confusion. We conclude that Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) offers strong protection for an attorney’s interest in client retainers through security interests, even though some courts have misapplied the UCC in this context. Further, we recommend …

Ethical Limits On Promising To Pay An Adverse Award Of Attorney’S Fees Against One’S Client, Chase C. Parsons

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming.

The Overreach Of Limits On 'Legal Advice', Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower, more explicit definition of legal advice that advances, rather than undercuts, access to justice.

Introducing Students To Ethics And Professionalism Challenges In Virtual Communication, Katherine M. Koops, James E. Moliterno, Carol E. Morgan, Carol D. Newman

Scholarly Articles

As the practice of law, and the conduct of business generally, focuses increasingly on virtual communication, the ethics and professionalism challenges inherent in email, videoconference, text, and telephone communication continue to evolve. These challenges are particularly prevalent in transactional practice, which involves frequent communication with a variety of parties through a variety of communication channels. Exposing law students to these challenges through exercises and simulations contributes to the continued development of their professional identity as lawyers.

This article presents a variety of exercises that introduce students to client confidentiality, inadvertent disclosure, and other ethical issues that often arise in the …

A Study Of Tax Lawyers Discussing Duties, Michelle M. Kwon, Michael Hatfield

Scholarly Works

This Article reports the first qualitative empirical study of U.S. tax lawyers. We interviewed women lawyers who were tax planning specialists. Though this is the first such study of U.S. tax lawyers, this methodology has been used often to study the professional ethics of other tax practitioners around the world. We had three research questions that we sought to answer through dynamic conversations on topics such as the distinctions between good and bad tax plans and good and bad tax lawyers and also the joys and stresses of tax practice. Our first research question was as to the make-up of …

Strategies And Techniques For Integrating Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Into The Core Law Curriculum : Comprehensive Guide To Dei Pedagogy, Course Planning, And Classroom Practice, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

AALL Legal Website of the Month

Professor Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law has authored a book about the strategies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into classrooms. The focus of this publication is on learning outcomes and assessments, and course planning templates for each course in the core law curriculum, and racial trauma-informed teaching approaches. Each chapter also includes FAQs and discussion questions to work through for the course planning and DEI curricular initiatives to transform the way we think, teach, learn and act such that all experiences and ways of being are handled with fairness and justice.

Aba Employment Summary Class Of 2022, University Of Tennessee College Of Law

ABA Disclosures

No abstract provided.

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Choice Of Law And Time, Jeffrey L. Rensberger

Tennessee Law Review

Choice of law is usually thought of as a problem of law across geography, of how laws apply to persons and events not entirely within a state's boundaries. But time is another dimension to the choice of law problem. In cases wholly domestic to a single state, this temporal issue appears when a court considers whether a change in law has retroactive application. But changes in law occur in interstate cases as well. Moreover, the facts relevant to a choice of law analysis may change between the time of the underlying events and the litigation. Does the court consider facts …

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Opioid Accountability, Daniel G. Aaron

Tennessee Law Review

The opioid crisis has steadily killed Americans for twenty years. In total, we have lost more than 500,000 American lives since the 1990s, and countless more suffer from chronic addiction.

After years of piecemeal efforts to address this massive loss of life and health, the opioid litigation, largely centralized in Ohio federal district court, has brought significant hope for change. But there is a notable divide between the popular sense of the litigation and its reality. A full 57% of Americans believe that opioid companies should be held accountable for precipitating a public health crisis. However, the litigation, has been …

Antitrust's Ai Revolution, Daryl Lim

Tennessee Law Review

Antitrust law operates like an algorithm. Its lodestar, the rule of reason, is a black box. Unlike most other areas of the law, judges, not Congress, write the rules and sometimes in surprisingly capricious ways. These rules govern everything from Google and Facebook's "killer acquisitions" to vaccine development agreements during a pandemic. Injecting artificial intelligence (AI) into antitrust analysis seems prosaic, but in fact, it is revolutionary.

Courts routinely lean on ideology as a heuristic when they must interpret the rule of reason in light of economic theory and evidence. Chicago School conservatism reined in some excesses of earlier populist …

Contents

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Case Index

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dna Exonerations And Stakeholder Responses: A Case Of Cognitive Dissonance, Anne Richardson Oakes, Julian Killingley

Tennessee Law Review

The availability of DNA testing developed in the 1980s transformed the ability of prosecutors to secure convictions while providing Innocence Projects with the tools to overturn them. However, DNA exonerations which establish conclusively that a person convicted of a crime is in fact innocent, can represent a major threat to the value systems and therefore the self-belief of stakeholders who acted in good faith and in the genuine but mistaken belief that the exoneree was guilty. This Article reports on the findings of an investigation into stakeholder responses to DNA exonerations between 1990-1999 when DNA evidence was new and more …

The Not-So-Odd Couple: Specific Personal Jurisdiction And Party Joinder, Haley Palfreyman Jankowski

Tennessee Law Review

Traditionally, scholars and courts alike have thought of joinder of parties and personal jurisdiction as separate questions. Party joinder determined who should be in the lawsuit, whereas personal jurisdiction determined what power courts could exercise over those parties-a question that invariably becomes more complicated when more parties are added to the lawsuit. The Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court forced a reckoning between these two areas of civil procedure. In Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Court irreversibly connected specific personal jurisdiction and party joinder by holding that non-Californian plaintiffs could not be part of a California lawsuit …

Does Motive Also Follow The Bullet? Transferred Intent And Violent Crimes In Aid Of Racketeering, Melvin L. Otey

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxing Creativity, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Tennessee Law Review

The recent sell offs of song catalogs by Bob Dylan, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, and Mick Fleetwood for extraordinarily large sums of money raise questions about the law on creativity. While patent and copyright laws encourage a wide array of creative endeavors, tax laws

governing monetization of creative works do not. The Songwriters Capital Gains Equity Act, in particular, solidifies creativity exceptionalism, exacerbates tax inequities among creators, and perpetuates racial disparities in the tax Code. This Article asserts that the law must encourage creativity from all creators. It is time to eliminate tax exceptionalism for musical compositions or expand its …

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sb8? Flagrantly Unconstitutional Laws, Procedural Scheming, And The Need For Pre-Enforcement Offensive Litigation, Kimberley Harris

Tennessee Law Review

Reproductive rights are facing multiple existential threats. While the Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to pre- viability elective abortions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in Texas the ability to obtain a pre-viability abortion vanished almost ten months earlier. With the enactment of S.B. 8, the so-called "Texas Heartbeat Act," abortions after approximately the sixth week of pregnancy, including those that result from rape or incest, were banned months before the Court ruled in Dobbs. Despite being clearly unconstitutional under the then-existing precedent of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Texas …

The Present Public Meaning Approach To Constitutional Interpretation, Michael L. Smith

Tennessee Law Review

Originalists often respond to critics by claiming that originalism is worth pursuing because there are no feasible alternatives. The thinking goes that even the most scathing critiques of originalism fall flat if critics fail to propose a preferable alternative to originalism. After all, it takes a theory to beat a theory. This Article proposes such a theory. While most variations of originalism require that the Constitution be interpreted based on its original public meaning, this Article proposes that the Constitution should instead be interpreted based on its present public meaning. This alternative has attracted surprisingly little discussion in the originalist …

Workplace Harasser Liability: Assailing Moral Hazards And Rehabilitating The Individualist Approach, Ryan H. Nelson

Tennessee Law Review

The focus of recent workplace harassment scholarship has been on irreproachable workplaces. Without detracting from that literature, this Article seeks to rehabilitate the individualist approach as a worthy supplement to institutional liability. It explicates, contextualizes, and outlines solutions to the moral hazards that would shelter workplace harassers from the risks of individual harasser liability if such liability ever comes to pass, thereby reclaiming the deterrent potential of the individualist approach. This Article begins by exploring how, without additional law reform, individual harasser liability would fail to optimally deter workplace harassment in two regards. First, it presents and analyzes original empirical …

Teaching Theranos, Priya Baskaran

Tennessee Law Review

The story of Theranos and disgraced CEO Elizabeth Holmes highlights numerous missed opportunities for effective intervention by corporate counsel. In particular, the lawyers at Theranos served as weak gate-keepers who were easily steamrolled by a power-drunk entrepreneur. The dominant business law pedagogy contributes to this problem by emphasizing litigation mitigation as the primary function of corporate lawyers. This framing improperly minimizes the role and influence of transactional attorneys to the detriment of all involved. Law Professors can change this narrative through much needed pedagogical innovation. Currently, any innovation in business law courses centers on the incorporation of drafting and other …

How Rhetoric Reveals Judicial Motives In Employment Discrimination Cases, Susan E. Provenzano

Tennessee Law Review

Employment discrimination plaintiffs tend to lose on summary judgment. In these cases, judges are acting like juries and undermining anti-discrimination legislation while paying lip service to the law and the judicial role. How and why are courts doing this? Legal scholars blame bad doctrine and biased judging. But neither one tells the full story. The tell is in the opinions' strategic use of language, which shows how the court, as an institution, "sized up" the case and the motives of key actors the parties, the lawmakers, other courts, and the court itself. Conducting the first-ever rhetorical analysis of this problem, …

The Rulification Of General Personal Jurisdiction And The Search For The Exceptional Case, Judy M. Cornett

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Trauma As Inclusion, Raquel Aldana, Patrick M. Koga, Thomas O'Donnell, Alea Skwara, Caroline Perris

Tennessee Law Review

This article brings together a historian and law, public health, psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience faculty and researchers to document how trauma is understood across disciplines and how it has developed in U.S. immigration law largely to exclude but increasingly to include migrants whose lives have been uprooted or otherwise impacted by borders. Our aim is to document and assess the progress and the gaps in immigration law's embrace and understanding of trauma through metrics that include the science of trauma, compassion, and fairness. This analysis is made urgent by the travesty we are witnessing of borders completely shut to desperate …

Subject Index

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Multi-Level Marketing Pandemic, Christopher Bradley, Hannah E. Oates

Tennessee Law Review

Among the societal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a sharp rise in the activities of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs). MLMs are business enterprises in which participants seek not only to sell products to friends, family, and social media contacts, but also to recruit them as MLM participants, with the promise of "building their own business from home."

False promises often pervade MLM sales pitches. Evidence shows that few participants see even a dollar of profit from their MLM work; the vast majority of recruits quickly abandon their MLM dreams and lose their investments. Yet the pitch has become …