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Full-Text Articles in Law
Lawyers Judging Experts: Oversimplifying Science And Undervaluing Advocacy To Construct An Ethical Duty?, David S. Caudill
Lawyers Judging Experts: Oversimplifying Science And Undervaluing Advocacy To Construct An Ethical Duty?, David S. Caudill
Working Paper Series
My focus is on an apparent trend at the intersection of the fields of evidentiary standards for expert admissibility and professional responsibility, namely the eagerness to place more ethical responsibilities on lawyers to vet their proffered expertise to ensure its reliability. My reservations about this trend are not only based on its troubling implications for the lawyer’s duty as a zealous advocate, which already has obvious limitations (because of lawyers’ conflicting duties to the court), but are also based on the problematic aspects of many reliability determinations. To expect attorneys—and this is what the proponents of a duty to vet …
Conflicts Of Interest In Criminal Cases: Should The Prosecution Have A Duty To Disclose?, Anne Poulin
Conflicts Of Interest In Criminal Cases: Should The Prosecution Have A Duty To Disclose?, Anne Poulin
Working Paper Series
This article addresses two types of conflicts of interests that arise in criminal cases: 1) when defense counsel has an employment relation to the prosecutor’s office, and 2) when defense counsel faces criminal investigation or charges. Both these situations threaten both the defendant’s representation and the actual as well as apparent fairness of the proceeding. Yet, only in extreme cases are these conflicts likely to result in a reversal of the defendant’s conviction. As a result, protection of the defendant and the fairness of the process often depends on early intervention, which allows the court to advise the defendant of …
Of Apples And Trees: Adoption And Informed Consent, Ellen Wertheimer
Of Apples And Trees: Adoption And Informed Consent, Ellen Wertheimer
Working Paper Series
This article argues that the doctrine of informed consent should apply to the process of adopting a child. There is substantial evidence that all adopted children are at higher risk of learning disabilities and mental health problems than nonadopted children. The article first summarizes the social science evidence demonstrating these risks and discusses some of the reasons why more extensive studies have not yet been done. The article then turns to the law of informed consent as created and applied in the contexts of medicine and law, and concludes that informed consent doctrine should apply to the process of adoption. …
Lawyers In The Moral Maze , Mark A. Sargent
Lawyers In The Moral Maze , Mark A. Sargent
Working Paper Series
This article overviews the various forms of lawyer complicity in illegal or immoral behavior by corporate managers in the corporate scandals of the last three years, but focuses primarily on the question of why lawyers so often seemed willing to engage in or ignore behavior that presumably violated their own personal moral codes (whether religious or secular) as well as their professional role morality. The article draws on Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes (1988) for an answer derived from the sociology of corporate bureaucracies. Jackall's case studies of corporate managers found that managers adhered to the moral "rules-in-use" developed in their …
Lawyers In The Perfect Storm, Mark A. Sargent
Lawyers In The Perfect Storm, Mark A. Sargent
Working Paper Series
The multiple corporate collapses and scandals of recent years, for which "Enron" is a convenient shorthand, resulted from a perfect storm in which regulatory oversight, the law of fiduciary duty, gatekeepers, market discipline, and contractual incentives all failed to prevent gross self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and deception, or themselves produced perverse consequences. The story of this simultaneous failure of the structures in place since the New Deal and before, has received considerable attention in both the popular and scholarly literature, but is summarized here to provide a context for consideration of the contributions that lawyers made to the perfect storm. …