Law Commons^™

Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations …

Keeping Lawyers' Houses Clean: Global Innovations To Advance Public Protection And The Integrity Of The Legal Profession, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Around the globe regulators are rethinking the scope of their mandates and responsibilities. They are assuming more expansive roles rather than limiting their efforts to disciplining lawyers after misconduct occurs. This Article examines such regulatory initiatives in three areas. First, it discusses developments related to proactive management-based programs in which regulators partner with lawyers who self-assess their firms’ management systems. Data reveal that such assessments help lawyers avoid problems through developing their firms’ ethical infrastructure. When misconduct occurs, injured persons often seek monetary redress. These persons may not be able to obtain recovery unless they have suffered substantial damages to …

Capitalizing On Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case For Law Firms To Promote And Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being, Jarrod F. Reich

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first to make the business case for firms to promote and prioritize lawyer well-being. For more than three decades, quantitative research has demonstrated that lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction far in excess of the general population. Since that time, there have been many calls within and outside the profession for changes to be made to promote, prioritize, and improve lawyer well-being, particularly because many aspects of the current law school and law firm models exacerbate mental health and addiction issues, as well as overall law student and lawyer distress. These calls for change, made …

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 …

Peter Singer, Drowning Children, And Pro Bono, John M.A. Dipippa

Faculty Scholarship

This Article uses the ethicist Peter Singer's principles to examine and critique the legal profession's pro bono efforts in the face of the persistent gap between the public's legal needs and their ability to meet them. Singer argues that adults should jump into a pond to save a drowning child. Using the drowning child as an analogy, this Article argues that lawyers are morally obligated to (1)increase the amount of their pro bono efforts, (2) be more selective in the cases they take, and (3) be significantly more generous in their financial support for legal services providers. These obligations are …

The Codification Of Professionalism: Can You Sanction Lawyers Into Being Nice?, Debra M. Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

On October 31, 2013, the Florida Supreme Court in The Florida Bar v. Norkin made it clear that "it wants the trend of escalating incivility among lawyers to stop." With that decision, in which a lawyer was suspended and publicly reprimanded for his behavior, the court urged that "[m]embers of The Florida Bar, law professors, and law students should study" this case "as a glaring example of unprofessional behavior." This article heeds the court's directive to do so, but also places it in the context of the movement to enhance professionalism statewide.

The Challenges Of Developing Cross-Cultural Legal Ethics Education, Professional Development, And Guidance For The Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The broad goal of this paper is to describe the need, and provide a framework, for engaging in cross-cultural conversations among lawyers, law teachers, and others, who are using legal ethics as a vehicle for improving the legal professions and the delivery of legal services. All legal cultures struggle with the question of how to educate students and lawyers to be ethical professionals and how to regulate the legal profession effectively. The purpose of the cross-cultural conversations discussed in this paper would be to develop principles of legal ethics education, professional development, and regulation of the legal professions that can …

Licensing And Discipline Of Fiscal Professionals In The State Of Florida: Attorneys, Certified Public Accountants, And Real Estate Professionals, Debra Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to compare the regulation of several professions within the state of Florida. In Florida, attorneys are self-regulated through the Florida Bar. As a branch of the Supreme Court of Florida, The Florida Bar serves as the licensing agency of attorneys within the state. Two other professions--real estate professionals and certified public accountants--in which the public also places fiscal trust and responsibility, are regulated through a different agency, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation. This article seeks to examine and explain the different methods of licensing and regulation between these professional groups and looks …

Reflections On The Ethics Of Legal Academics: Law Schools As Mdps; Or, Should Law Professors Practice What They Teach Symposium: Ethics Of Law Professors, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

[A member of the House of Commons said in Samuel Johnson's presence] that he paid no regard to the arguments of counsel at the bar of the House of Commons, because they were paid for speaking. JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, argument is argument. You cannot help paying regard to their arguments, if they are good, If it were testimony, you might disregard it, if you knew that it were purchased. There is a beautiful image in Bacon upon this subject: testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the hand that draws it. …

Clients Don't Take Sabbaticals: The Indispensable In-House Clinic And The Teaching Of Empathy, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

After almost 12 years in law teaching, I approached my first sabbatical with a single goal: to free myself from cases. At that time my clinic clients were primarily parents who were involved in family court proceedings in which they were trying to preserve their parental rights and get their children out of the foster care system. Such cases are emotionally draining for both the client and the lawyer. Thus, while I welcomed the chance to have a semester off from teaching and attending faculty and committee meetings, I felt that I needed a break from the demands of lawyering …

Law Day 2050: Post-Professinalism, Moral Leadership, And The Law-As-Business Paradigm Symposium, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Inspired by Ted Schneyer's future history of professional discipline' and Bob Gordon's descrption of "the hazy aspirational world" of the "Law Day Sermon,' I offer a vision of the legal profession 'a next fifty years in the form of a Law Day speech from the year 2050. Looking back on developments in the first half of the twenty-first century, this piece explores the implications of the analysis proposed in my earlier article, The Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve the Conduct and Reputation of the Bar. The speech presents a projection of the moral leadership the bar …

Professionalism: Rekindled, Reconsidered Or Reformulated?, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

It is increasingly commonplace for bar officials and others to decry what they see as a decline in "professionalism" among lawyers in recent years. For example, in 1984, former Chief Justice Warren Burger gave a speech to an ABA meeting in Las Vegas in which he chastised some members of the profession for taking their freedom to advertise as a "release from all professional restraints," as they use the "same modes of advertising as other commodities from mustard, cosmetics and laxatives to used cars.' 1 Catchy phrases, attractive well-dressed lawyers, and special rates on lossleader items are but some of …

Women In The Law School: It's Time For More Change, Karen Czapanskiy, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.