Law Commons^™

"X-Spurt" Witnesses, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this article the author pulls together a history of expert witnesses in common law systems. Various issues are explored regarding expert witness testimony, including: the historical underpinnings of the practice, how Daubert controls that issue in modern times, rules of evidence, psychological science, and professional ethics.

"Show And Tell": An Analysis Of The Scope Of The Attorney-Client Waiver Standards, Roberta M. Harding

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As today's society becomes increasingly litigious, document productions, a major discovery tool, are growing larger. One inevitable consequence of this phenomenon is the increased risk that communications protected by the attorney-client privilege may be inadvertently disclosed. Privileged communications may also be disclosed to an adversary under more questionable circumstances: specifically, the intentional, strategic disclosure of privileged information favorable to the disclosing party's position.

In any case involving the disclosure of privileged information, the court must initially decide whether the privilege is waived. To resolve this threshold issue courts apply one of the three waiver tests. If a court decides that …

Instilling An Appreciation Of Legal Ethics And Professional Responsibility In First-Year Legal Research And Writing Courses, Beth Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

The Author suggests that the First-year legal research and writing classes provide the logical forum to remind students of the importance of honesty and integrity both to their work and to the profession and to society as a whole. The Author believes that teachers would do well to take advantage of this unique opportunity to provide such lessons early and often and more importantly, as part of the regular legal research and writing curriculum.

Professional Responsibility And Choice Of Law: A Client-Based Alternative To The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct, Colin Owyang

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Because of the increasingly interstate nature of legal practice during the past few decades, practitioners licensed in multiple jurisdictions have been forced more frequently to confront choice-of-law dilemmas in the area of professional responsibility. Although most states have adopted fairly uniform regulations on professional ethics, only the recently amended American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct contain a specific provision that addresses the choice-of-law problem in the professional responsibility context. This Note outlines certain ethical considerations facing the multistate practitioner and argues that the choice-of-law provision in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides insufficient clarity and predictability where …

Rhetoric, Evidence, And Bar Agency Restrictions On Speech By Attorneys, Lloyd B. Snyder

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

There are two problems with permitting litigation about attorney speech to proceed without requiring bar disciplinary agencies to present empirical data or other evidence to support claims that restrictions on attorney speech are necessary. First, the history of bar association restrictions on attorney speech should make us skeptical that the bar rules are based on lofty ideals about protection of the public. The restrictions began as rules promulgated by elite corporate lawyers whose effect was to limit the activities of their less affluent brethren who were representing criminal defendants and other impoverished clients. The purpose of the rules was to …

Rewards For Good Behavior: Influencing Prosecutorial Discretion And Conduct With Financial Incentives, Tracy L. Meares

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: The Proper Role Of The Bankruptcy Attorney, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the tension between the lawyer's duty to her client and her duty to the legal system as an officer of the court. It concludes that, in a situation in which those two duties conflict, the lawyer's duty to the system as a whole should trump the duty to the client.

Attorneys On Bioethics Committees: Unwelcome Menace Or Valuable Asset, Randall B. Bateman

Journal of Law and Health

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role(s), if any, of the attorney as a member of bioethics committees, especially hospital ethics committees. In the process of determining whether an attorney should serve on these committees, the arguments will contrast the potential role of an attorney with the different types of attorneys who may be chosen to serve as members of a hospital ethics committee. The ultimate conclusion of this paper is that attorneys do have a role on ethics committees, but that the role depends on the type of attorney, the individual committee and the way the …

Taking Private Ordering Seriously, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the rules and practices of private groups have attracted substantial attention within the field of law and economics. In applications ranging from Robert Ellickson's seminal work on rancher/farmer relations in Shasta County, California, to Lisa Bernstein's investigation of extralegal contractual relations among wholesale diamond traders, to Robert Cooter's study of aboriginal customs in Papua New Guinea, to Robert Scott and Alan Schwartz's analysis of the rulemaking procedures of the American Law Institute, an increasing number of legal and economic scholars have shown how private systems of rules work to regulate economic relations among the communities that adopt …

Standards Of Professional Conduct In Alternative Dispute Resolution, John Feerick, Carol Izumi, Kimberlee Kovach, Lela Love, Robert Moberly, Leonard Riskin, Edward Sherman

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …