Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Biblical Prophets As Lawyers For The Poor, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Lawyers practicing poverty law often lack mentors and role models. This author discusses how biblical figures, who served poor people, could be mentors and role models for lawyers practicing poverty law. Prophets, and particularly prophets-as-lawyers, redefine power relationships. Shaffer discusses his personal journey through out his career in using religious guidance to help him better understand his career. He also discuss his teachings to his law students of the value of learning from prophets in their legal careers.

Incremental Bar Admission: Lessons From The Medical Profession, Jayne W. Barnard, Mark Greenspan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Who Needs The Bar?: Professionalism Without Monopoly, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Professionalism has an idealistic dimension and an institutional one. The idealistic dimension is the notion of voluntary commitment to both client interests and public values. The institutional dimension is the ideal of self-regulation by the bar.

The idealistic dimension remains powerful. However disappointed we are by the distance between the profession's ideals and its members' practices, these ideals continue to inspire valuable efforts. Various professional organizations are making admirable contributions through pro bono representation of disadvantaged people, public education, and disinterested law reform efforts in a range of areas, such as litigation procedure, prisons, and judicial selection. Moreover, the bar's …

Towards A New Scholarship For Equal Justice, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years, the legal academy has turned a cold shoulder to the subject matter of this symposium: scholarship for equal justice. I am here to suggest that a thaw may be on the way. By scholarship for equal justice – as distinguished from scholarship about that topic – I mean academic work undertaken for the purpose of improving outcomes for individuals and members of groups who have been systematically held back by their race, sex, poverty, or any other basis for rationing success that our legal system treats with suspicion. With reference to some of my own …

Equality And The Forms Of Justice, Susan Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Justice and equality are simultaneously noble and messy aspirations for law. They inspire and demand collective striving toward principle, through the unflinching comparison of the "is" and the "ought." Yet, law operates in the world of the practical, tethered to the realities of dispute processing and implementation. The work of many great legal scholars and activists occupies this unstable space between principle and practice. Owen Fiss is one such scholar, attempting to straddle the world of the here-and-now and the imagined and then deliberately constructed future, the contours of which have been established during the founding moments of our constitutional …

The Structure Of Legal Education And The Legal Profession, Multidisciplinary Practice, Competition, And Globalization, Mary C. Daly

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Ethics 2000 And Conflicts Of Interest: The More Things Change . . . ., Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Unpleasant Duties: Imposing Sanctions For Frivolous Appeals, Mark R. Kravitz

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Appellate Malpractice, Steven Wisotsky

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

Mdps, Spinning, And Wouters V. Nova, Laurel S. Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

This article is one of a series of articles by Professor Laurel Terry regarding the topic of MDPs of multidisciplinary partnerships. In February 2002, the European Court of Justice issued its opinion in Wouters v. NOVA (Case C-309/99), which addressed a Netherlands Bar rule that prohibited multidisciplinary partnerships (MDPs) between lawyers and accountants. Wouters decided: 1) that the bar was an “undertaking” that was subject to the competition (antitrust) provision in the EU Treaty; 2) that the Dutch MDP ban restricted competition and that this restriction on competition was appreciable and affected intra-community trade; 3) that the Dutch MDP ban …

Comparative Multi-Disciplinary Practice Of Law: Paths Taken And Not Taken, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It is always an interesting journey to return to one's roots, and many of the most important of my personal and professional roots are here in Cleveland, including my birth and the first twenty years of life. Subsequent wanderings have taken me far from here, but always to return. We consider here another set of journeys and pathways that are institutional, not personal. The paths traversed are both national and international, and they will take us on journeys that are far from completed. They concern the ways in which various contemporary legal cultures have so far approached the subject of …

Government Officials As Attorneys And Clients: Why Privilege The Privileged?, Melanie B. Leslie

Articles

No abstract provided.

“Certain Fundamental Truths”: A Dialectic On Negative And Positive Liberty In Hate-Speech Cases, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Ethics In An Atmosphere Of Skepticism And Relativism, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

I would like to do several things in this essay. First, I am interested in the sources of students' wariness about moral reasoning and claims about objectivity and truth in ethics. Sometimes I feel like a teacher of geography who must confront a deeply entrenched belief that the earth is flat. The earth is not flat, nor is ethics just a matter of opinion, but one wonders why students persist in thinking the opposite. Teaching effectively requires an understanding of where students are coming from. Accordingly, the opening section of this essay is structured around a series of hypotheses to …

Furthering Justice By Improving The Adversary System And Making Lawyers More Accountable, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Expanding State Jurisdiction To Regulate Out-Of-State Lawyers, Charles W. Wolfram

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Fortifying A Law Firm's Ethical Infrastructure: Avoiding Legal Malpractice Claims Based On Conflicts Of Interest, Susan Saab Fortney, Jett Hanna

Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses the prevailing problem of malpractice claims based on conflicts of interest. Part I of this article introduces the topic by underscoring the seriousness of all conflicts of interest and recommending preventative action. Part II describes measures that law firms can take to detect and manage conflicts and analyzes the effect of the firm’s ability to avoid conflicts claims on a firm’s ethical infrastructure. Part III focuses on some of the most common conflicts situations that result in malpractice claims and sanctions. The discussion includes selected conflicts cases that illustrate problems and patterns. Part IV concludes by urging …

The Pursuit Of Justice: New Directions In Scholarship About The Practice Of Law, Alex J. Hurder

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Forming An Agenda - Ethics And Legal Ethics, Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

The law profession is unique in the scope of the mandate it gives those within it to intervene in other people's affairs. As a result of this unique power of intervention, lawyers encounter a number of unique problems. This paper elucidates upon, and applies, the moral standards and intuitions to be used in approaching these problems. It argues that we should form our consciences in dialogue with our clients and that once they are formed we must follow them and limit our representation accordingly. If lawyer and client cannot agree on an agenda with which both are comfortable, the lawyer …

The Social Responsibility Of Corporate Law Professors, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

Most statements of corporate social responsibility focus on the responsibilities of corporate decision makers or their advisors Professor Johnson argues that corporate law professors-the persons who educate the students who will become lawyers counseling corporate decision makers-also have a social responsibility. He believes that professors should find various ways to raise the subject of corporate social responsibility in the basic corporations course, and he advocates rejecting a classroom approach that addresses only shareholder-manager relations After describing several possible ways to do this, Professor Johnson spotlights fiduciary laws as a fruitful area to enrich student understandings of director duties in a …

Between Law And Virtue, Joseph P. Tomain, Barbara Watts

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Legal ethics, professional responsibility, and professionalism are timely topics as lawyers continually reevaluate the standards of their profession, particularly in light of the challenges of multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional practice, as well as the embarrassment facing lawyers involved in and surrounding the Enron collapse. In this article, our goal is to discuss how to think and talk about ethics and professionalism. By way of preview, we need to understand that ethics and professionalism use different vocabularies and, consequently, talk past each other to some extent. Our hope is that understanding the existence of these two vocabularies helps reduce the misunderstanding. Both …

Charles Dickens' Bleak House: Mr. Tulkinghorn As A Successful Literary Lawyer, Maureen E. Markey

St. Thomas Law Review

After a short summary of the story of Bleak House, this Article analyzes the character of Mr. Tulkinghorn as a "successful literary lawyer" according to the criteria described by Richard Weisberg in his book Poethics. This Article concludes that, although Mr. Tulkinghom may be considered "successful" in one sense of the word-he is powerful, he achieves his goals, he makes money-he is an abject failure from an ethical, moral, humanistic, or any other perspective. Mr. Tulkinghorn's behavior simply cannot and should not be justified under ethical norms. This Article challenges attempts by lawyers to do so, as providing ammunition for …

Silence Is Golden: The New Illinois Rules On Attorney Extrajudicial Speech, 33 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 323 (2002), Alberto Bernabe

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Who's In Charge Here?: Putting Clients In Their Place, 37 Ga. L. Rev. 1 (2002), Jason Kilborn

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fit And Functional In Legal Ethics: Developing A Code Of Conduct For International Arbitration, Catherine A. Rogers

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this Article, the author develops a methodology for prescribing the normative content of a code of ethics for international arbitration, and in a forthcoming companion article, integrated mechanisms for making those norms both binding and enforceable are proposed. In making these proposals, the author rejects the classical conception of legal ethics as a purely deontological product derived from first principles. This Article argues, instead, that ethics derive from the inter-relational functional role of advocates in an adjudicatory system, and that ethical regulation must correlate with the structural operations of the system. The fit between ethics and function, the author …

Justice For Interests Of The Poor: The Problem Of Navigating The System Without Counsel, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

No abstract provided.

Client Confidences And Public Confidence In The Legal Profession: Observations On The Aba House Of Delegates Deliberations On The Duty Of Confidentiality, Irma S. Russell

Faculty Works

This article sets forth points to encourage the ABA House of Delegates to reconsider proposed revisions to Model Rule 1.6 (b)(2) and (b)(3) and to reject any proposals to revert back to the former rule. Specifically, the article urges the delegates to: 1) be aware of absolutes and consider proportionality; 2) recognize lawyers as trustworthy decision makers; and 3) acknowledge the profession's responsibility to the public. The article suggests that the possibility of reverting to the former rule is radically out of step with the tradition of confidentiality in the American legal profession and with the rules of professional conduct …

Lawyer Conduct In The "Tobacco Wars", Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Maccrate's Missed Opportunity: The Maccrate Report's Failure To Advance Professional Values Symposium, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

The 1992 Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap (the "Task Force"), Legal Education Professional Development - An Educational Continuum, popularly known as the MacCrate Report (the "Report"), was the most ambitious effort to reform legal education in the past generation. Some commentators have described the Report as "the greatest proposed paradigm shift in legal education since Langdell envisioned legal education as the pursuit of legal science through the case method in the late 19th century.” Although the Report sought to promote education in both lawyering skills and values, its major influence has …

Legal Ethics Must Be The Heart Of The Law School Curriculum Symposium: Recommitting To Teaching Legal Ethics- Shaping Our Teaching In A Changing World, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Despite what seems to be far greater attention paid to the teaching of legal ethics than to any other law school subject, legal ethics remains no better than a second class subject in the eyes of students and faculty. This essay suggests that all efforts at innovation in legal ethics teaching are doomed to a marginal impact at best. Only recognition that legal ethics is the most important subject in the law school curriculum will lead to real and significant changes in the teaching of legal ethics. If the commitment of the legal profession and of legal academia to producing …