Law Commons^™

Who Watches The Watchmen? Using The Law Governing Lawyers To Identify The Applicant Duty Gap And Hold Bar Examiner Gatekeepers Accountable, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession holds lawyers to high standards in their personal and professional lives and expects aspiring members to follow the ethical rules with scrupulous precision and candor. Yet the profession, and those monitoring admission to the profession, afford no protections or recourse to this class of young professionals during that critical period between graduation and successful bar passage.

Without reform, this previously unacknowledged duty gap will continue to demoralize and potentially harm future lawyers and reflect negatively on the profession as a whole. Supervising bodies, discussed within, treat applicants as if they have already committed an ethical breach. Indeed, …

Playing By The Rule: How Aba Model Rule 8.4(G) Can Regulate Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Discrimination during voir dire remains a critical impediment to empaneling juries that reflect the diversity of the United States. While various solutions have been proposed, scholars have largely overlooked ethics rules as an instrument for preventing discriminatory behavior during jury selection. Focusing on the ABA Model Rule 8.4(g), which regulates professional misconduct, this article argues that ethics rules can, under certain conditions, offer an effective deterrent to exclusionary practices among legal actors. Part I examines the specific history, evolution, and application of revised ABA Model Rule 8.4(g). Part II delves into the ways that ethics rules in general, despite their …

Avoiding Judicial Discipline, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

Over the past several years, several high-profile complaints have been levied against Article III judges alleging improper conduct. Many of these complaints, however, were dismissed without investigation after the judge in question removed themselves from the jurisdiction of the circuit’s judicial council—oftentimes through retirement and once through elevation to the Supreme Court. When judges—the literal arbiters of justice within American society—are able to elude oversight of their own potential misconduct, it puts the legitimacy of the judiciary and rule of law in jeopardy.

This Essay argues that it is imperative that mechanisms are adopted that will ensure investigations into judicial …

Designing And Improving A System Of Proactive Management-Based Regulation To Help Lawyers And Protect The Public, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, lawyers and decision-makers are recognizing the limitations and consequences of current approaches to attorney regulation. Inspired by developments in other countries, regulators in the United States and Canada have started the process of exploring innovative approaches, including proactive management-based regulation. The term, proactive-management regulation (PMBR), was first used by Professor Ted Schneyer to refer to a regulatory approach designed to promote ethical law practice by assisting lawyers with practice management.

The seed for PMBR was first planted in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). It grew out of the legislation that allowed limited liability and non-lawyer ownership …

Cracks In The Profession's Monopoly Armor, John Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the legal profession’s long-held monopoly in the nation’s legal services market in the context of two recent developments. The first development concerns the Conference of Chief Justices’ (CCJ) recent adoption of Resolution 15, “Encouraging Adoption of Rules Regarding Admission of Attorneys Who Are Dependents of Service Members.” Resolution 15 urges state bar authorities to develop and implement rules permitting admission without examination of lawyers who are military dependents. The CCJ’s rule promotes competition by facilitating the movement of lawyers from one geographic market to another.

The second development is Washington Supreme Court’s new Admission to Practice Rule …

Conceptions Of Agency In Social Movement Scholarship: Mack On African American Civil Rights Lawyers [Comments], Susan Carle

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)-namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites …

Legal Ethics Versus Political Practices: The Application Of The Rules Of Professional Conduct To Lawyer-Politicians, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canadian legal ethics has paid little attention to how the rules of professional conduct for lawyers apply to lawyer-politicians – that is, politicians who happen to be lawyers. This article addresses this issue with reference to what Canadian case law and commentary do exist, supplemented by more plentiful American materials. It proposes a distinction between conduct that is politically expedient and conduct in which lawyer-politicians’ duties as lawyers come into apparent conflict with their duties of office. Canadian case law reveals three conflicting approaches to this latter category: that the duties of a lawyer prevail, that the duties of a …

Financiers As Monitors In Aggregate Litigation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

This Article identifies a market-based solution for monitoring large-scale litigation proceeding outside of Rule 23’s safeguards. Although class actions dominate the scholarly discussion of mass litigation, the ever increasing restrictions on certifying a class mean that plaintiffs’ lawyers routinely rely on aggregate, multidistrict litigation to seek redress for group-wide harms. Despite sharing key features with its class action counterpart—such as attenuated attorney-client relationships, attorneyclient conflicts of interest, and high agency costs—no monitor exists in aggregate litigation. Informal group litigation not only lacks Rule 23’s judicial protections against attorney overreaching and self-dealing, but plaintiff’s themselves cannot adequately supervise their attorneys’ behavior. …

A Golden-Age Of Civil Involvement: The Client-Centered Disadvantage For Lawyers As Law Makers, James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Legal And Managerial "Cultures" In Corporate Representation, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Equality And Affiliation As Bases Of Ethical Responsibility, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Competent Legal Writing - A Lawyer's Professional Responsibility, Debra R. Cohen

Journal Articles

The legal profession is constantly evolving to keep pace with our increasingly complex society.' Today, the legal profession "is larger and more diverse than ever before." Despite this transformation, "the law has remained a single profession identified with a perceived common body of learning, skills and values." This common body of learning, skills, and values constitutes the fundamental elements of competent representation. Writing is one of the essential skills of competent representation.

"Law is a profession of words." Lawyers use words, both written and oral, in a wide array of contexts-to advise, to advocate, to elicit information, to establish legal …

Foreword, Symposium, The Legal Profession: The Impact Of Law And Legal Theory, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Underlying Causes Of Withdrawal And Expulsion Of Partners From Law Firms, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From "Moral Stupidity" To Professional Responsibility, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Within the context-even, the challenge-presented by the first chapter of Seymour Wishman's book, Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer, we symposiasts have been invited to say something about the teaching of courses which in law school go under the titles, "Legal Ethics," "Professional Ethics," or "Professional Responsibility." This last is the
title of a two-credit course that I teach, in what I take to be a fairly traditional form, over the span of a semester at the University of Cincinnati. In this essay, I want to talk about the teaching of such a course; not about how I manage to teach …

Why Pro Bono In Law Schools, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyer Liability In Third Party Situations: The Meaning Of The Kaye Scholar Case, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

The Kaye Scholer I case has excited much attention and alarm within the legal profession. 2 It is interpreted as greatly expanding the scope of lawyer liability to third parties and heralding much greater regulatory intervention into the relationship between lawyer and client. In some respects this interpretation is accurate. The Kaye Scholer proceeding is at least a "wake up call" to the legal profession, signalling that lawyers should be much more attentive to their legal and ethical obligations in transactional and regulatory matters. However, there is also much misunderstanding about Kaye Scholer, particularly the supposition that it created novel …

Being A Teacher, Of Lawyers: Discerning The Theory Of My Practice, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Professional Responsibility, Clark D. Cunningham

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Artists, Workers, And The Law Of Work: Keynote Address, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Client Centered Counseling And Moral Accountability For Lawyers, Robert M. Bastress

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.