Law Commons^™

Preface, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Several years ago, when I lived in Indiana, I got a grant to write a book about lawyers. The newspaper ran a story about it; the paper said I was to study the morals of lawyers. A friend of mine sent me a clipping of the story with a note that said, "It won't take long." My friend held the common Hoosier view that lawyers have no morals. A frontier story tells of the Indiana lawyer who died and whose body was laid out in a room and left for the night. When morning came, there was nothing left in …

The Legal Ethics Of The Two Kingdoms, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The question I propose to address while I am with you is this: Is there a special morality for professional life? In terms of convention and argot, the answer to that question would appear to be: Yes, there is a separate morality for the professional lives of lawyers and judges. We do not follow the same morals in public and professional life as we follow in personal life.

Henry Knox And The Moral Theology Of Law Firms, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

One of the reasons we modern American lawyers find the "golden age" of our 19th century forebears attractive is that it was morally unambiguous. It seems to have been an age of giants who were consistent. The "republican" lawyers who wrote our first statements on legal ethics were moral theologians as well as leaders—and they found no difficulty in being both. David Hoffman, who attracted as much applause from the conservative Calvinists at Princeton Theological Seminary as he attracted from the bench and bar, drew no distinction between the morals he practiced at home and the morals he practiced in …

Professional Independence And The Associate In A Law Firm: A French Case Study, Tang Thi Thanh Trai Le

Journal Articles

In June 1977, as a result of a case brought before the Tribunal de la Seine, a "mini-revolution" erupted in French legal circles. A young woman associate of a law firm was discharged at mid-month and paid half (F. 1250) her monthly salary. Mme X considered her dismissal improper and filed a complaint with the Bdtonnier (President) of the Paris Bar. After a hearing, the Conseil de l'Ordre (Executive Committee of the Bar) advised the firm to pay Mme X an additional F. 1250 in settlement. Not satisfied, Mine X took her case to the Tribunal de la Seine requesting …

Serving The Guilty, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

My purpose here is to ask whether there is a moral way for a lawyer to serve the guilty. I think this is an issue Mr. Rightor would have enjoyed. He was devoted to the instruction of future lawyers, particularly those who studied law at this law school and were enrolled in his classes in professional ethics. He was equally devoted, in the midst of a busy and successful law practice, to care and compassion for the occasional professional colleague who had, as Mr. McDonald said in his eulogy, "through ignorance or . . . financial plight . . . …

Legal Counseling And Lawyers' Fees: A Quadrilogue, Thomas L. Shaffer, Louis M. Brown, Robert S. Redmount, Larry D. Soderquist

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Discusses the relationship between legal counseling and lawyers' fees. Attitudes of lawyers toward legal counseling; Area of legal counseling related to human needs and human interactions; Usefulness of counseling time.

The Practice Of Law As Moral Discourse, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The beginning and end of a lawyer's professional life is talking with a client about what is to be done. I My claim here is that this is a moral conversation. I will suggest three ethical orientations which seem to govern the conversation, and then weigh the adequacy of each of the three orientations.

A Lesson From Trollope For Counselors At Law, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This article is about the process by which a person makes up his mind. In literature, the making up of a character's mind is a stage on which an author lets you know about his people and about his time. An example is Huckleberry Finn deciding whether to report Jim, his companion and a runaway slave. I propose to consider another example of a literary character making up his mind-the story of Septimus Harding and the sinecure, in The Warden, a quaint Victorian ecclesiastical tale by Anthony Trollope.

Lawyers spend hours helping their clients make up their minds. The process …

Bar Polls: What They Measure, What They Miss, Errol E. Meidinger

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Counselors, And Counselors At Law, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Most lawyers often act as counselors. Prof. Harrop Freeman's survey, Counseling in the United States (1967), suggests that some lawyers spend as much as 80 per cent of their professional time in what they classify as counseling-talking with clients on subject matters that do not result in documents, lawsuits, or negotiations with third persons. The average lawyer spends about a third of his time in counseling. As the nature of the profession changes under various no, fault reforms in traditional fields of litigation, lawyers of the 1980s probably will spend even more of their professional time in counseling. This professional …

The Corporate Antitrust Audit - Establishing A Document Retention Program, Sheldon S. Toll, Joseph P. Bauer

Journal Articles

Preventive maintenance is a doctrine with which lawyers are becoming—or should become—increasingly familiar. Since the field of antitrust law is potentially fraught with dire consequences for corporate clients, it is an area in which the doctrine of preventive maintenance should be liberally applied.

Estate Planning Games, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This paper fits somehow into several years of research and conjecture on legal counseling-the study of what takes place in the law office, in one-on-one relationships between professional and client. Most of my work has been in what is called the "estate planning" field-partly because it is an emotionally elaborate professional activity that takes place in the office, and not in courts or meetings or committees; and partly because it is my primary teaching interest, the field of legal endeavor I know most about.

Toward A Jurisprudence For The Law Office, Thomas L. Shaffer, Louis M. Brown

Journal Articles

Brown is the founder and foremost exponent of preventive law jurisprudence. Shaffer has dwelt in recent books and essays on the parallels between humanistic psychology and the fife of lawyers. In this dialogue they focus their somewhat diverse insights on law as living; on their agreement that lawyer-client decisions are law in any functional sense of the word; and on the premise that an explicable jurisprudence is implicit in the process of law office decision making.

Some Speculation About Artificial Intelligence And Legal Reasoning, Bruce G. Buchanan, Thomas E. Headrick

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No abstract provided.

Experience-Based Teaching Methods In Legal Counseling, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert T. Grismer

Journal Articles

Lawyers spend more time in their offices, in person-to-person encounters counseling troubled individuals, than in any other single area. The alternative to this is litigation, an expensive, inefficient, dis-functional process. Lawyers are counselors, in the most Sartrean sense of the word; whether they intend to be or not.

The presence of the counseling element in most of what lawyers do is subtle, which is probably why we have tended to overlook it. "The more we transform our ways of walking and talking, the better professional people we're going to be," one of our students said, ". . . better able …

Undue Influence, Confidential Relationship, And The Psychology Of Transferenc, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This article attempts to describe a common human relationship as it has been developed in two traditions which are today largely separated from one another. The relationship is referred to as "confidential" in the law and as "transference" in psychoanalytical psychology. Legal insight on the phenomenon is found mainly in the appellate literature on gratuitous transfers obtained by undue influence; psychological insight occurs in the practice and speculation of therapists who have discovered the phenomenon in psychotherapy. Both traditions are useful in understanding the confidential or transference factor in human interaction. The interaction itself has impact beyond the appellate cases …

The "Estate Planning" Counselor And Values Destroyed By Death, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Most lawyers would like to know more about how clients feel in law-office encounters with death, property, and giving. The immediate source of experience and information should be psychology-research psychology as well as therapeutic psychology. However, psychology has not concerned itself with the substance of the law; what is usually called "law and psychology" as an interdisciplinary area of study is confined to border areas-insanity as a criminal defense, testamentary capacity, civil commitment to mental institutions. The task of developing psychological models which reach the substance of law itself, and the dynamics of lawyer-client relationships, is one psychologists have not …

Reflections On Professor Chroust's The Rise Of The Legal Profession In America, Donald P. Kommers

Journal Articles

A review of Anton-Herman Chroust’s 1965 study on lawyers and the status of the legal profession in the United States from early colonial days to 1830.

Though the review praises the wealth of facts and detail in the work it argues that Chroust is more interested in glorifying the early American legal profession rather than analyzing the conditions for its growth. It also contends that Chroust does not organize his material according to a coherent theory or conceptual scheme. The review, in addition, asserts that Chroust focuses too much on the pious and self-righteous rhetoric lawyers at the time, assuming …

The Future Of The Model Code Of Evidence, Thomas F. Broden, John J. Broderick

Journal Articles

Recent studies by the US Treasury Department and the Meade Committee in Britain have one thing in common. They recommend a progressive tax on personal consumption as an alternative to the income tax and discuss the practical problems of substituting consumption for income as the tax base. These studies suggest that replacing the income tax with an expenditure tax is now being considered a serious possibility. Advocates for the expenditure tax base their arguments on considerations of equity, administrative convenience and economic efficiency. The article examines the merits of these arguments, with a focus on four important non-economic issues in …

The Lawyer And The Public, Thomas Frank Konop

Journal Articles

In this address, I am purposely omitting a discussion of the subject of "Delays in Litigation" as that matter was covered by the address of Judge Cain on last Monday. Cherishing the hope that my talk may bring about a better acquaintance with, and a better understanding of the lawyer, I propose to address myself to the general public, rather than to my professional brethren. If any of you have ever attended an annual bar-banquet and there heard the usual and orthodox address on the legal profession, you undoubtedly went home impressed with the idea-whether you believed it or not-that …