Law Commons^™

Scorched Border Litigation, Briana Beltran, Beth Lyon, Nan Schivone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Each year, employers bring hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers into the United States only to return them to their communities of origin when their visas end. During their short months working in the United States—whether in agricultural fields, hotels, traveling carnivals, or private homes—many of these workers experience violations of their rights: wages are stolen, injuries are ignored, and those who complain are punished on the spot or sent home.

Temporary foreign workers who choose to file a lawsuit to vindicate their rights typically do so once they are no longer in the United States, often litigating from …

In Search Of Core Values, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

A consensus appears to have emerged among American lawyers that globalization and information technology are transforming the practice of law in fundamental ways. In particular, non-lawyers are increasingly involved in what has traditionally been defined as the practice of law. Scholars such as Richard Susskind, in the United Kingdom, and Thomas Morgan, in the United States, have hypothesized that lawyers may be going the way of wheelwrights, cordwainers or mercers (traders in fine cloths and silks), and that one day in the not-so-distant future we will consider the profession of lawyer as something to be studied historically, wonder why lawyers …

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 …