Law Commons^™

The Ethics Of Trump's Shadow Lawyers?, Peter A. Joy, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Scholarship@WashULaw

The barrage of over sixty failed lawsuits filed by lawyers representing former President Donald Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election brought forth numerous calls to sanction these lawyers. So far, Rule 11 and disciplinary sanctions have reached one of the most public of the pro-Trump lawyers, Rudolph Giuliani, as well as some of the lawyers who filed and put their names on the complaints initiating the frivolous cases. This Essay discusses the need to impose sanctions on the lawyers behind the scenes—who directed and coordinated the bogus cases—but so far have largely evaded accountability.The authors …

Ethical Duty To Investigate Your Client?, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

Lawyers have been implicated in corporate scandals and other client crimes or frauds all too often, and the complicity of some lawyers is troubling both to the public and to members of the legal profession. This is especially true when the crime involved is money laundering. As a response to attorney involvement in crimes or frauds, some legal commentators have called for changes to the ethics rules to require lawyers to investigate their clients and client transactions under some circumstances rather than remaining “consciously” or “willfully” blind to what may be illegal or fraudulent conduct. The commentators argue that such …

Lawyering In The Academy: The Intersection Of Academic Freedom And Professional Responsibility, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such …