Law Commons^™

Law School News: Melissa Dubose L'04 Confirmed To Federal District Court 3-12-2024, Suzi Morales

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

6th Annual Stonewall Lecture 2-2-2023, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Changemakers: Master Of Studies In Law: "Exactly What I Needed...": John Marion, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

Law Library Blog (November 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Oflaw

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Take Note: Teaching Law Students To Be Responsible Stewards Of Technology, Kristen E. Murray

Catholic University Law Review

The modern lawyer cannot practice without some deployment of technology; practical and ethical obligations have made technological proficiency part of what it means to be practice-ready. These obligations complicate the question of what constitutes best practices in law school.

Today’s law schools are filled with students who are digital natives who don’t necessarily leverage technology in maximally efficient ways, and faculty who span multiple generations, with varying amounts of skepticism about modern technology. Students are expected to use technology to read, prepare for class, take notes, and study for and take final exams. Professors might use technology to teach or …

How And Why Did It Go So Wrong?: Theranos As A Legal Ethics Case Study, G.S. Hans

Georgia State University Law Review

The Theranos saga encompasses many discrete areas of law. Reporting on Theranos, most notably John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, highlights the questionable ethical decisions that many of the attorneys involved made. The lessons attorneys and law students can learn from Bad Blood are highly complex. The Theranos story touches on multiple areas of professional responsibility, including competence, diligence, candor, conflicts, and liability. Thus, Theranos serves as a helpful tool to explore the limits of ethical lawyering for Professional Responsibility students.

This Article discusses the author’s experience with using Bad Blood as an extended case study in a new course on Legal …

Collared—A Film Case Study About Insider Trading And Ethics, Garrick Apollon

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article discusses the visual legal advocacy documentary film, Collared, by Garrick Apollon (author of this Article). Collared premiered in fall 2018 to a sold-out audience at the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto for the Hot Docs for Continuing Professional Education edutainment initiative. Collared features the story and reveals the testimony of a convicted ex-insider trader who is still struggling with the tragic consequences of “the most prolonged insider trading scheme ever discovered by American and Canadian securities investigators.” The intimate insights shared by former lawyer and reformed white-collar criminal, Joseph Grmovsek, serves as a painful reminder of the …

Law Talk In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Over three decades ago, Sarat and Felstiner published a ground-breaking ethnographic study of divorce client-lawyer conversations. They concluded that lawyers portrayed "a chaotic 'anti-system' in which [clients] cannot rely on the technical proficiency, or good faith, of judges and rival lawyers" but need to rely on their own lawyers' insider status to achieve reasonable outcomes.1 Although lawyers initially described the law and procedure to their clients, they rarely referenced that rational description when explaining what had occurred or would occur in their clients' cases. This law talk may have gradually and ultimately persuaded the clients to reach reasonable settlements, but …

The Professor As Institutional Entrepreneur, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Law professors are all about ideas, and the creation of an institute, clinic, or center within a law school is the instantiation of an idea. Ideas embodied in law school institutions become crystallized in the fabric of a school, changing its culture, internalizing its values, and reflecting its priorities. Robert Cochran has helped to establish multiple institutes, centers, and clinics at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and in so doing he has become the law school's great serial entrepreneur. The institutes Cochran helped to establish have become laboratories to give expression to his ideas about the relationship between faith, ethics, and …

Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school is supposed to teach legal analysis and lawyering skills as well as mold law students’ professional identities. Pro Bono work provides an opportunity for law students to use their legal knowledge and skills and to develop their identities as emerging legal professionals. As important as both pro bono work and identity formation are, there has been very little research regarding how pro bono contributes to students’ identity formation. This paper utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice clinic that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study …

Learning From Our Mistakes: Conversation Analysis Reveals Best Practices For A Student-Staffed Pro Bono Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law schools make “pro bono” opportunities available to students to introduce them to the responsibilities of the profession. Often these pro bono law students help in “brief advice” projects staffed by volunteer attorneys. This staffing-supervision structure presents challenges in ensuring clients receive competent, individualized advice and the students receive adequate oversight so that this is a positive learning experience for them. This paper analyzes transcripts from 46 recorded student-client interviews and 35 student-attorney consultations. It focuses on those cases where there were “errors or omissions” -- either the client got some erroneous advice or the client did not receive complete, …

The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school aims to teach lawyering skills as well as legal analysis. While all students must acquire the skills of legal analysis, research and writing, law schools may decide what other skills to teach. Students also acquire skills and habits in informal ways, through clerkship experiences or pro bono volunteer work. However, there has been almost no study of what “skills” students pick up in these informal ways, and whether there are skills that would better be learned as part of the curriculum. This study looks at the skill of legal interviewing employed by students in a pro bono brief …

A Rebuttal To Kinsler's And To Anderson And Muller's Studies On The Purported Relationship Between Bar Passage Rates And Attorney Discipline, William Wesley Patton

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Because of the escalating cost of legal education and the recent decline in bar passage rates among ABA approved law schools, some analysts have reasonably attempted to determine the social costs of legal education. Many have attempted to place the blame on segments of the legal education marketplace. The complicated relationships among the policies of providing more access to justice, increasing minority representation in the bar, and protecting the public from shoddy law practice have recently inflamed academic debate. In the rush for assessing blame, some analysts have published empirically flawed reports that have received a great deal of …

Legal Intelligence Through Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotional Intelligence: A New Competency Model For The 21st Century Legal Professional, Alyson Carrel

Georgia State University Law Review

The nature of legal services is drastically changing given the rise in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Legal education and training models are beginning to recognize the need to incorporate skill building in data and technology platforms, but they have lost sight of a core competency for lawyers: problem-solving and decision-making skills to counsel clients on how best to meet their desired goals and needs. In 2014, Amani Smathers introduced the legal field to the concept of the T-shaped lawyer. The T-shaped lawyer stems from the concept of T-shaped professionals who have a depth of knowledge in …

An Appraisal Of Maqāsid Al-ShariʿAh Classic And Recent Literature: Systematic Analysis, Ahmad Syukran Baharuddin Asb, Wan Abdul Fattah Wan Ismail Wafwi, Lukman Abdul Mutalib Lam, Muhammad Hazim Ahmad Mha, Ruqayyah Razak Rr, Nurul Syahirah Saharudin Nss, Muhammad Aiman Abdull Rahim Maar

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Maqāsid al-Shariʿah has been typically defined as the objectives behind the Islamic rulings or the Shariʿah higher intent. This knowledge is very important for the mujtahids and Islamic scholars not only to understand or interpret the Shariʿah legal texts, but also to deduce solutions for contemporary problems faced by Muslims. Maqāsid al-Shariʿah is traditionally divided into three levels of necessity, which are necessities (al-Ḍaruriyyāt), needs (al-Ḥajiyyāt), and luxuries (al-Taḥsiniyyāt). Extensive discussion of maqāsid al-shariʿah in Islamic jurisprudence has led to the classification of five elements of preservation, inter alia, protection of faith or …

Law School News: Rwu Law Remembers President Donald J. Farish 07-05-2018, Ed Fitzpatrick, Michael Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Texas Standards For Appellate Conduct: An Annotated Guide And Commentary, Gina M. Benavides, Joshua J. Caldwell

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The legal profession is bound by ethical rules that govern and guide our conduct and actions as lawyers. One of the under-appreciated, but profoundly important set of guidelines is the Texas Standards for Appellate Conduct. These Standards serve as an excellent practice guide for appellate practitioners and appellate courts and as a model code of conduct for the Bar as a whole.

The goal of this Article is to dissect the Texas Standards for Appellate Conduct and provide useful commentaries for the readers to better appreciate and understand each element of the Standards. The commentaries provide direct case examples and …

Causation And "Legal Certainty" In Legal Malpractice Law, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

A line of California cases holds that causation of damages in legal malpractice actions must be proven with “legal certainty.” This Article argues that judicial references to legal certainty are ambiguous and threaten to undermine the fairness of legal malpractice litigation as a means for resolving lawyer-client disputes. Courts should eschew the language of legal certainty and plainly state that damages are recoverable if a legal malpractice plaintiff proves, by a preponderance of the evidence, that those losses were factually and proximately caused by the defendant’s breach of duty.

"Dirty" Experts: Ethical Challenges Concerning, And A Comparative Perspective On, The Use Of Consulting Experts, David S. Caudill

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

U.S. attorneys often hire consulting experts who potentially never get named as testifying experts. The same practice is evident in Australia, where the colloquial distinction is between a “clean” and a “dirty” expert, the latter being in the role of a consultant who is considered a member of the client’s “legal team.” A “clean” expert named as a witness is then called “independent,” signaling that he or she is not an advocate. In contrast to the U.S. discourse concerning consulting and testifying experts, focused on discovery issues, the conversation in Australia betrays immediate ethical concerns that both (i) explain why …

Conference On The Ethics Of Legal Scholarship

Marquette Law Review

None

Professionalism And Ethics Section Takes Its Turn, Jodi Nafzger

Jodi Nafzger

Membership in [the Professionalism and Ethics Section of the Idaho State Bar] provides Idaho attorneys an opportunity to work closely with colleagues who share a vision for a profession that embodies personal courtesy and professional and ethical integrity. We are fortunate to practice law in a state that values this vision, and we invite you to attend our CLEs [Continuing Legal Education] and join our membership. [excerpt]

Law Library Blog (March 2017): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

State Bar Efforts To Deny Accreditation To Faith-Based Cle Ethics Programs Sponsored By Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Religiously affiliated law schools focus on the integration of faith in the formation of future attorneys and leaders. Yet our students are only our students for three years. We can extend our influence and continue to provide a faith-based perspective to them and to other attorneys during the thirty, forty, or more years of their careers by offering continuing legal education (CLE) courses, which bring attorneys and judges together to provide a model for incorporating faith and morality into our professional roles. However, CLE programs must receive accreditation by state authorities if participants are to receive credit for them. Recently, …

Moonlighting Sonata: Conflicts, Disclosure And The Scholar/Consultant, Jeffrey L. Harrison, Amy R. Mashburn

UF Law Faculty Publications

Although the impact of conflicting interests is of constant concern to those in legal education and other fields, a recent scholarly article and an extensive analysis in the New York Times suggest the problem is more pressing than ever. In the context of legal scholarship the problem arises when a professor is, in effect, employed by two entities. Disclosure of possible conflicts is the most commonly proposed response. The article argues that disclosure is merely a risk shifting devise that does not fully address the issue of bias. It draws on comparisons with products liability and legal ethics to suggest …

Balzacian Legality: A Proposal For Natural Law Juridicial Standards Of Legality, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Thomas Carbonneau

The task of the present article is twofold. First, it represents an attempt to make an original English language contribution to the continuing interdisciplinary inquiry, begun in France, into the presence of law in Balzac's The Human Comedy, by focusing upon themes and novels that have not been the subject of previous individual study. Second, it seeks to contribute to an area of growing interest to legal scholars in the United States – the study of law and literature – by providing an example of the insights one French novelist with legal training and experience had into questions that forever …

Law School Based Incubators And Access To Justice – Perspectives From Deans, Patricia E. Salkin, Ellen Suni, Niels Schaumann, Mary Lu Bilek

Patricia E. Salkin

At the end of February 2015, law professors, law deans, incubator staff and attorneys, and self-selected others gathered at California Western School of Law for the Second Annual Conference on Law School Incubators and Residency Programs. The incubators that are the subject of this article tend to focus on transition to law practice and access to justice, and some are also working to incorporate technology for the practice of law as a means of enhancing access to justice. As more law schools decide to host, sponsor or offer an incubator, and following our panel discussion at the February 2015 incubator …

Incubating Community Law Practices: Post-Graduate Models For Lawyer Training And Access To Law, Luz E. Herrera

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

Incubator Development At Home And Abroad: Anecdotal Stories From The Trenches, Fred Rooney

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

Ethical Challenges Of Using Law Student Interns/Externs To Expand Services To Low-Income Older Adults, Eleanor Lanier

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.