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Jimmy Hoffa's Revenge: White-Collar Rights Under The Mcdade Amendment, John G. Douglass

Law Faculty Publications

I begin the Essay with a bit of comparative history. In Part I, I describe the death and burial of the Sixth Amendment no-contact rule espoused by Jimmy Hoffa. In Part II, I contrast the birth and expansion of an extra-constitutional no-contact rule under Model Rule 4.2 and the McDade Amendment. I begin with these contrasting histories because I believe they illustrate two critical points about the no-contact rule in criminal investigations. First, despite its place in codes of ethics, the no-contact rule in criminal investigations has little to do with ethics. Instead, today's debate over Rule 4.2 is simply …