Law Commons^™

The Ethics Of Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Michigan Law Review

A large literature has emerged in recent years challenging the standard conception of adversary advocacy that justifies the lawyer in doing anything arguably legal to advance the client's ends. This literature has proposed variations on an ethic that would increase the lawyer's responsibilities to third parties, the public, and substantive ideals of legal merit and justice.

With striking consistency, this literature exempts criminal defense from its critique and concedes that the standard adversary ethic may be viable there. This paper criticizes that concession. I argue that the reasons most commonly given to distinguish the criminal from the civil do not …

Are Criminal Defenders Different?, David Luban

Michigan Law Review

No one has done more to expose the jurisprudential incoherence of this view of legal practice than William Simon. In his 1978 article, The Ideology of Advocacy, Simon demonstrated a series of internal contradictions in the most promising attempts to justify the ideology of advocacy. Subsequently, in Ethical Discretion in Lawyering, Simon elaborated an alternative view according to which lawyers must exercise independent judgment in both their choice of clients and their choice of means in pursuing client ends.

In Simon's view, those who carve out the criminal defense exception have been taken in by what he calls …

Reply: Further Reflections On Libertarian Criminal Defense, William H. Simon

Michigan Law Review

Since David Luban's is the work on legal ethics that I admire and agree with most, there is an element of perversity in my vehement critique of his arguments on criminal defense. I am therefore especially thankful for his gracious and thoughtful response. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that Luban is mistaken in excepting criminal defense from much of the responsibility to substantive justice that we both think appropriate in every other sphere of lawyering.

Revising Article 9 To Reduce Wasteful Litigation, James J. White

Articles

For reasons that are unclear to me, the committees reviewing the articles of the Uniform Commercial Code and drafting revisions are congenitally conservative. Perhaps these committees take their charge too seriously, namely, to revise, not to revolutionize. Perhaps their intimate knowledge of the subject matter exaggerates the importance of each section and consequently magnifies the apparent size of every change. In any case, my own experience with two such committees tells me that the members quickly become focused on revisions and amendments that any outsider would describe as modest. To the extent that the revision of any of the articles …

The Romance Of Revenge: Capital Punishment In America, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

On February 17, 1992, Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive terms of life imprisonment for killing and dismembering 15 young men and boys (Associated Press 1992a). Dahmer had been arrested six months earlier, on July 22, 1991. On January 13 he pled guilty to the fifteen murder counts against him, leaving open only the issue of his sanity. Jury selection began two weeks later, and the trial proper started on January 30. The jury heard two weeks of testimony about murder, mutilation and necrophilia; they deliberated for 5 hours before finding that Dahmer was sane when he committed these …

Child Protection Law, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Book Chapters

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect a parent's custodial rights. However, such rights are not absolute and may be terminated. There is no substantive due-process right to live together as a family. Doe v Oettle, 97 Mich App 183, 293 NW2d 760 (1980). Parents are not held to ideal standards in the care of their children but to minimum statutory standards. Fritts v Krugh, 354 Mich 97, 92 NW2d 604 (1958).