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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Law
Daubert/Kumho Tire And The Legal Malpractice Expert Witness, Warren Trazenfeld, Robert M. Jarvis
Daubert/Kumho Tire And The Legal Malpractice Expert Witness, Warren Trazenfeld, Robert M. Jarvis
Faculty Scholarship
In legal malpractice cases, parties almost always end up using expert witnesses. Whether a particular legal malpractice expert is qualified to testify often is a hotly contested issue. In this Article, the authors provide recommendations for how to qualify a legal malpractice expert and how to challenge a legal malpractice expert’s qualifications.
The Exclusion Of Public Legal Education From Mandatory And Aspirational State Pro Bono Service Requirements, Amy Wallace
The Exclusion Of Public Legal Education From Mandatory And Aspirational State Pro Bono Service Requirements, Amy Wallace
Articles & Chapters
Pro bono service is embedded in legal education and practice. Every year, lawyers and law students across the United States engage in countless hours of pro bono service. There are over 1.3 million lawyers in the country and more than one hundred thousand law students enrolled in law school. Lawyers perform an average of thirty-seven hours of pro bono work each year. They reference several factors that motivate them to perform this work but the desire to help people in need ranks highest. Professional duty is also listed as an important factor for lawyers choosing to perform pro bono work. …
Toward More Robust Self-Regulation Within The Legal Profession, Veronica Root Martinez, Caitlin-Jean Juricic
Toward More Robust Self-Regulation Within The Legal Profession, Veronica Root Martinez, Caitlin-Jean Juricic
Faculty Scholarship
The Trump Administration left reverberations throughout American life, and the legal profession was not insulated from its impact. The conduct of lawyers—both public and private—working on behalf of former President Trump was the subject of constant conversation and critique. The reality, however, is that the questions regarding the conduct of the Trump Administration lawyers, are rooted, in part, in more fundamental questions about the appropriate role of the lawyer within society. This Essay advocates for the adoption of a self-regulation scheme whereby lawyers regulate and oversee the conduct of other lawyers, to ensure that members of the legal profession are …
The Appearance Of Appearances, Michael Ariens
The Appearance Of Appearances, Michael Ariens
Faculty Articles
The Framers argued judicial independence was necessary to the success of the American democratic experiment. Independence required judges possess and act with integrity. One aspect of judicial integrity was impartiality. Impartial judging was believed crucial to public confidence that the decisions issued by American courts followed the rule of law. Public confidence in judicial decision making promoted faith and belief in an independent judiciary. The greater the belief in the independent judiciary, the greater the chance of continued success of the republic.
During the nineteenth century, state constitutions, courts, and legislatures slowly expanded the instances in which a judge was …
Anti-Discrimination Ethics Rules And The Legal Profession, Michael Ariens
Anti-Discrimination Ethics Rules And The Legal Profession, Michael Ariens
Faculty Articles
“Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behaviour. How shall I gain a Reputation! How shall I Spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished Genius, Learning, and Virtue.” So wrote twenty-four-year-old John Adams in his diary in 1759. He had been a licensed lawyer for just three years at that time and had already believed himself to be hounded by “Petty foggers” and “dirty Dablers in the Law”—unlicensed attorneys who, Adams claimed, fomented vexatious litigation for the fees they might earn.
Adams believed his embrace of virtue, along with genius …
Legal Ethics For Government Lawyers: Confronting Doctrinal Gaps, Andrew Martin
Legal Ethics For Government Lawyers: Confronting Doctrinal Gaps, Andrew Martin
Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press
Despite the recent growth in the Canadian literature on legal ethics for government lawyers, the leading conceptual models have yet to be applied to resolve many of the most important legal questions facing government lawyers. In this article, I identify four key situations where the obligations of government lawyers as lawyers appear to clash with their obligations as public servants. I provide both a doctrinal analysis of how the current law applies in those situations and proposals for how the law can be clarified and improved. This analysis both provides much needed guidance to government lawyers and promotes a greater …
Impeaching Legal Ethics, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe
Impeaching Legal Ethics, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe
Articles & Chapters
In the investigations, hearings, and aftermath of President Trump’s first impeachment, lawyer-commentators invoked the rules of professional conduct to criticize the government lawyers involved. To a large extent, these commentators mischaracterized or misapplied the rules. Although these commentators often presented themselves to the public as neutral experts, they were engaged in political advocacy, using the rules, as private litigators often do, as a strategic weapon against an adversary in the court of public opinion. For example, commentators on the left wrongly conveyed that, under the rules, government lawyers had a responsibility to the public to voluntarily assist in the impeachment, …
The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens
The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens
Faculty Articles
John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.
Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …
The Entity Attorney-Client Privilege Meets The Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Functional Equivalent Analysis In The Time Of A Nonemployee Workforce., Grace M. Giesel
The Entity Attorney-Client Privilege Meets The Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Functional Equivalent Analysis In The Time Of A Nonemployee Workforce., Grace M. Giesel
Faculty Scholarship
Courts have struggled with whether an entity’s attorney-client privilege can protect communications between the entity’s lawyer and a nonemployee who has information the entity’s lawyer needs to best advise the entity. The nonemployee might be a former employee. But increasingly in recent times, the nonemployee is an individual who was never an entity employee. Corporations and other entities have incorporated nonemployees in their economic enterprises in all sorts of roles—roles employees may have held in the past. Many courts have accepted that the privilege can apply to communications involving former employees.
When faced with nonemployees who are not former employees, …
The Rules Of Professional Responsibility And Legal Finance: A Status Update, Anthony J. Sebok
The Rules Of Professional Responsibility And Legal Finance: A Status Update, Anthony J. Sebok
Articles
Legal finance occurs when strangers fund litigation for profit. Traditionally looked upon with suspicion in the common law, and limited by the doctrines of champerty and maintenance, legal finance is now a thriving part of the American legal landscape. Legal finance has been promoted as a solution to the access-to-justice problems facing working and middle class Americans, as well as a new asset class for Wall Street. At the center of legal finance, however, are lawyers – not the lawyers who write the contracts for the financing – but the lawyers for the cases being financed.
Over the past decade, …
Building Fierce Empathy, Binny Miller
Building Fierce Empathy, Binny Miller
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
In this Article I explore the process of building and sustaining empathy with clients in the context of representing juvenile lifers-- people convicted of serious crimes as children and sentenced to life or sentences that ensure that they spend most of their lives in prison--in a law school clinic. Before turning to my own lawyering experiences and those of my clinic students, I ground the discussion of empathy in the competing theories of Charles Ogletree and Abbe Smith about the value of empathic lawyering for public defenders. These theories, together with the contributions of other scholars, provide a springboard for …