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Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

In his 1994 seminal article on Federalizing Legal Ethics, Prof. Fred Zacharias examined the need for a national and uniform code of ethics for attorneys. Prof. Zacharias was correct that there has been increasing pressure to federalize legal ethics, but that process is occurring not through articulation of national norms but rather through decentralized contextualization of attorney conduct norms. Federal agencies that direct securities practice, immigration, tax, patent, labor and many other areas of federal practice are increasingly supplementing state regulations to specifically regulate the attorneys who appear before their agencies. Targeted substantive federal law and treaty obligations also increasingly …


Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The rapidly expanding Chinese legal profession provides an extraordinary opportunity for the U.S. legal profession to test U.S. assumptions about legal ethics. This essay examines challenges facing Chinese legal education and the Chinese legal profession as it develops norms of legal ethics. This essay examines this process from the law school and law student’s perspective about legal ethics, and then briefly explores the effort to create norms of attorney conduct from a top-down perspective. Both a bottom-up and top-down view show the tremendous challenges facing the emerging Chinese legal culture in building a coherent model of lawyering that can serve …


The (F)Utility Of Rules: Regulating Attorney Conduct In Federal Court Practice, Judith A. Mcmorrow Dec 2004

The (F)Utility Of Rules: Regulating Attorney Conduct In Federal Court Practice, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The problem is often decried: out-of-control attorneys, opportunists, cowboys, self-dealers, and overzealous prosecutors abusing the litigation process either for self-serving ends or from ideological zeal. But one person’s opportunist, cowboy, or self-dealer is another person’s zealous advocate. Lawyers want and need guidance on how to resolve issues that have competing claims to right behavior. The first place many lawyers look to find appropriate guidance are rules of ethics. Lawyers practicing in federal courts will find the search for rules particularly confusing. Unlike the Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure, federal courts do not operate with uniform ethics rules. District …