Law Commons^™

E-Mails To Clients: Avoiding Missteps, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this column for Kentucky Bar Association's magazine (B&B - Bench & Bar), Professor Hazelwood addresses the ethical implications of emailing with a client. Practitioners are provided a series of questions to ask before emailing a client.

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. …

Agenda: 2012 Energy Justice Conference And Technology Exposition, University Of Colorado Boulder. Center For Energy & Environmental Security, University Of Colorado Boulder. Colorado European Union Center Of Excellence, University Of Colorado Boulder. Presidents Leadership Institute

2012 Energy Justice Conference and Technology Exposition (September 17-18)

Co-sponsored with the Colorado European Union Center of Excellence and the Presidents Leadership Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The ability to harness energy is fundamental to economic and social development. Worldwide, almost 3 billion people have little or no access to beneficial energy resources for cooking, heating, water sanitation, illumination, transportation, or basic mechanical needs. Energy poverty exacerbates ill health and economic hardship, and reduces educational opportunities, particularly for women and children. Specifically, access to efficient and affordable energy services is a prerequisite for achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) relating to poverty eradication.

In response, the UN …

Virtue, Vice, And The Globalization Of World Economies, Stephen Preacher

Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study postulates that the recent world financial crisis, symptomatically manifested in the financial markets, is more fundamentally the result of a systemic disregard for moral constraints. This has occurred at macroeconomic levels within the industrialized nations and has pervaded the global economy. Moral relativism has become the dominant ethical system in society and government, and has undermined the virtuous ideals and self-restraint that foster the benefits of capitalism. Coupled with advances in technology and globalization, the effect of vices such as avarice, irresponsibility, excessive risk tolerance and criminal activities have been exacerbated. Government manipulation and intervention has further served …

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter, Spring 2012

Mid-Atlantic Ethics Committee Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Legal Ethics For The Millennials Avoiding The Compromise Of Integrity, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Collaboration And Coercion: Domestic Violence Meets Collaborative Law, Margaret B. Drew

Faculty Publications

‘Collaboration and Coercion’ addresses the systemic and individual concerns that arise when family members that have experienced abuse enter into the collaborative law process. A form of alternative dispute resolution, collaborative law is a method of resolving disputes without engagement of the legal system. The author addresses the structural and cultural difficulties that survivors of abuse encounter throughout the process as well as the ethical concerns that are raised when collaborative practitioners accept cases where the parties have a history of coercion within the intimate relationship.

Teaching Law Students To Be Policymakers: The Health And Science Policy Workshop On Genomic Research, Benjamin E. Berkman, Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Social Context Of Oncofertility, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

A field known as oncofertility provides female cancer patients with a variety of ways to preserve their fertility so that they may bear genetically related children after successful cancer treatment. Some women delay cancer therapy so doctors can collect their eggs, which are then cryopreserved in an unfertilized state or used to create embryos through in vitro fertilization for freezing. An experimental procedure for preserving the fertility of prepubertal girls, known as ovarian tissue cryopreservation, involves surgically removing their ovarian tissue and growing the immature eggs to a mature state so they can be frozen and stored until the girls …

The Mindful Law School: An Integrative Approach To Transforming Legal Education, Scott L. Rogers

Articles

No abstract provided.

Police Informers And Professional Ethics, Clive Harfield

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

The use of informers is morally problematic for police institutions, for investigation managers, and for those individuals either who act as informers or who have daily responsibility for handling informers. This paper examines the moral issues concerning informers at each of these levels. Recourse to informers can be accommodated within Miller and Blackler's moral theory of policing. Within this context, criteria for the morally justifiable deployment of informers are proposed and supplemented with further proposed criteria for morally justifiable informer participation in crime. Morally justifiable recruitment of informers is also considered. Despite directly serving the purpose of policing, informers do …

A Neurological Foundation For Freedom, Nita A. Farahany

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Substitute Decision Making About Research: Identifying The Legally Authorized Representative In Four Canadian Provinces, Sheila Wildeman, Gina Bravo, Marie-France Dubois, Carole Cohen, Janice Graham, Karen Painter, Suzanne Bellemare

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

When an adult is legally incapable of deciding whether to participate in health research, who (if anyone) has the legal authority to make that decision? Furthermore, how well do Canadians with a stake in health research, such as older adults, informal caregivers of older persons with cognitive impairments, researchers in aging, and members of research ethics boards (“REBs”), understand the state of the law on this question? These two interrelated matters are addressed by our study.

We find that the laws of the four provinces we target are frequently unclear as to whether, or in what circumstances, a guardian, proxy …

The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: Beginning To Examine The Implications For Canadian Lawyers' Professional Responsiblities, H Archibald Kaiser

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereafter the CRPD or the Convention) should herald a new epoch in the way persons with disabilities are treated throughout the world community. The entire panoply of ramifications of this Convention, the purpose of which is “to promote, protect and ensure the full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity”, (Article 1) is as yet unascertainable. However, States Parties must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by any person, organization or private enterprise” (Article …

Mad Money: Wall Street's Bonus Obsession, Jeanne L. Schroeder

Articles

No abstract provided.

Specious Claims And Global Settlements, S. Todd Brown

Journal Articles

Few problems are more disruptive to the efficient negotiation and operation of comprehensive mass tort settlements than oversubscription, which, at times, appears to be fueled primarily by specious claims. In settlements with opt out rights, a flood of claims can generate a market for lemons, with the weakest claims submitted to the settlement and the strongest opting out and seeking recovery at trial or in private settlement. In binding settlements, they may result in a commons problem, requiring dramatic reductions in payment that effectively transfer recoveries from those with intrinsically strong claims to those with weak claims.

This Article evaluates …

Reinventing The Wheel: Constructing Ethical Approaches To State Indigent Legal Defense Systems, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Indigent defense remains in a state of crisis. Almost fifty years after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, lack of funding, favoritism, inefficiency, and poorly-designed indigent-defense plans plague the system, which can best be characterized as being in a state of disrepair. As a result, accused indigent individuals, a vulnerable population, suffer from a lack of adequate representation. This Article reviews the history and implementation of various indigent-defense systems and examines the ethical issues arising from their operation. It offers a guide to reconstructing a model system, including the suggestion that attorneys first recommit the profession to …

Tending To Potted Plants: The Professional Identity Vacuum In Garcetti V. Ceballos, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Patient Racial Preferences And The Medical Culture Of Accommodation, Kimani Paul-Emile

Faculty Scholarship

One of medicine’s open secrets is that patients routinely refuse or demand medical treatment based on the assigned physician’s racial identity, and hospitals typically yield to patients’ racial preferences. This widely practiced, if rarely acknowledged, phenomenon — about which there is new empirical evidence — poses a fundamental dilemma for law, medicine, and ethics. It also raises difficult questions about how we should think about race, health, and individual autonomy in this context. Informed consent rules and common law battery dictate that a competent patient has an almost-unqualified right to refuse medical care, including treatment provided by an unwanted physician. …

Legal Ethics And Federal Taxes, 1945-1965: Patriotism, Duties, And Advice, Michael Hatfield

Articles

This article is devoted to exploring the legal ethics writings by tax lawyers in a pivotal period of income tax history: 1945-1965, the first two decades of the federal income tax as we now know it. Although the income tax began in 1913, it was World War II that created the modem mass income tax: in 1939 there were 3.9 million individual income tax taxpayers but by 1945 there were 42.6 million. This period was also one of significant progress in the administration of the income tax: the Internal Revenue Code was re-organized in 1954 and, following widespread corruption scandals, …

The Intersection Of Law And Ethics In Cyberwar: Some Reflections, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this short essay is to reflect upon a few issues that illustrate how legal and ethical issues intersect in the cyber realm. Such an intersection should not be especially surprising., Historian Geoffrey Best insists, “[I]t must never be forgotten that the law of war, wherever it began at all, began mainly as a matter of religion and ethics . . . “It began in ethics” Best says “and it has kept one foot in ethics ever since.” Understanding that relationship is vital to appreciating the full scope of the responsibilities of a cyber-warrior in the 21st century.

Judicial Decision Making In A World Of Natural Law And Natural Rights, George C. Christie

Faculty Scholarship

This article was my contribution to a symposium celebrating the achievements of John Finnis held at the Villanova University School of Law. Finnis’ greatest work is his Natural Law and Natural Rights. I agree with Finnis’ rejection of an approach to natural law which focuses on the notion of natural rights. Finnis’ approach instead focuses on a natural law that is based on the idea that there are certain basic human goods such as the search for knowledge, the maintenance of life, the sharing of fellowship with other human beings, the capacity to enjoy aesthetic experiences, and the exercise …

Why Animal Ethics Committees Don't Work, Denise Russell

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Animal ethics committees have been set up in many countries as a way to scrutinize animal experimentation and to assure the public that if animals are used in research then it is for a worthwhile cause and suffering is kept to a minimum. The ideals of Refinement, Reduction and Replacement are commonly upheld. However, while refinement and reduction receive much attention in animal ethics committees, the replacement of animals is much more difficult to incorporate into the committees’ deliberations. At least in Australia there are certain structural reasons for this but it is likely that most of the reasons why …

Engaging In Good Faith: Ethics, Archives, Critical Constitutionalisms - An Invited Response To Samuel W. Calhoun, Stopping Philadelphia Abortion Provider Kermit Gosnell And Preventing Others Like Him: An Outcome That Both Pro-Choicers And Pro-Lifers Should Support, Penelope J. Pether

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Like Professor Calhoun, I hold little hope for an end to this distinctive national battle in what Australian constitutional law scholars Tony Blackshield and George Williams, echoing Justice Scalia’s opinion in Romer v. Evans, aptly call our “‘culture war’ over issues of sexuality.” Other battles in this war, such as the current litigation in the federal courts over the constitutionality of bans on same-sex marriage or the controversy of the Obama Administration’s departure from its “science standard” in refusing the National Institutes of Health’s recommendations that the “morning after pill” be made available over-the-counter to minors, presently dot the jurisdiction, …

Professionalism And Matthew Shardlake, Alex B. Long

Scholarly Works

This Essay/Book Review examines the Matthew Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom. In particular, it examines the question of whether the sixteenth-century fictional lawyer Shardlake can serve as a role model for twenty-first-century lawyers, both in terms of his ethics and his professionalism. An examination of the Shardlake series as a whole yields some uncertain answers, both as to Shardlake and as to what it means to be an ethical and professional lawyer. This is ultimately part of what makes the series so enjoyable for lawyers.

Regulation And Theory: What Does Reality Have To Do With It, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Administrative Justice And Adjudicative Ethics In Canada, Lorne Sossin

Articles & Book Chapters

In this article, I explore both the idea and practice of adjudicative ethics in the context of administrative justice in Canada. This is a large topic and one which is particularly timely as accountability, transparency and conflict of interest are all renewed areas of interest for governments across Canada. Elsewhere, I have suggested it is time to approach administrative justice as a justice system rather than as a disparate set of tribunals and boards. One way in which this coordination can be expressed is through a shared process of accountability for the conduct of adjudicators. My hope in elaborating adjudicative …

Two And A Half Ethical Theories: Re-Examining The Foundations Of The Carnegie Report, Mark F. Kightlinger

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In the past three years, the American Bar Association, several major state bar associations, the Association of American Law Schools, the New York Times, law students, and many legal educators have called for fundamental changes in the way we educate new lawyers. Some critics have suggested that legal education faces a crisis that will be exacerbated by rising tuitions, declining enrollments, and a precipitous drop in the demand for new lawyers. Most of those calling for change have relied on the critical analysis of modem legal education presented in a 2007 report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement …

Higher Education, Corruption, And Reform, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Educational corruption is a problem in every country, particular at the college and university level. With illustrations drawn from the United States, this article considers what “basic principles” should shape efforts to deter, expose, and penalize corruption in academic institutions. The article then identifies “best practices” that should be followed by colleges and universities aspiring to high standards. The discussion explores the role that ethics codes and ethics education can play in fighting corruption. More specifically, the article addresses what types of substantive rules and systematic procedures are essential parts of effective higher education ethics codes. Mindful of the fact …