Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Bifurcation Of Undersecured Claims In Bankruptcy, David G. Carlson

Articles

The article examines the legal implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Dewsnup v. Timm on the bifurcation of undersecured claims in bankruptcy law. It critiques the ruling for creating confusion and potential inequities, arguing that it may diverge from the intent of the Bankruptcy Code. The analysis highlights the need for clearer guidelines to ensure consistent and fair treatment of secured and unsecured claims across different bankruptcy chapters.

Nonrefundable Retainers: A Response To Critics Of The Absolute Ban, Lester Brickman, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Articles

In the short span of time since the New York Court of Appeals banned nonrefundable retainers, numerous other courts have joined in prohibiting this widespread practice of lawyers charging a fee for services in advance and keeping the fee even if the services are not performed. The alacrity with which the New York rule is being embraced may reflect increased judicial recognition of the effect of egregious fee practices on the image of the bar and the role such practices play in the declining esteem in which the legal profession is held. Not only has there been a sharp decline …

The Deconstruction Of Kantian Ethics And The Question Of Pleasure, Henry J. Staten

Cardozo Law Review

This Essay is primarily about the recent work of Bernard Williams, who is in my opinion the most radical thinker on the question of ethics in the analytic philosophy camp. In fact, Williams's work tests the limits of what we know as analytic philosophy. His project is rigorously deconstructive, yet it has been developed out of the materials of analytic philosophy itself quite independently of Derridean deconstruction. Thus, this project is extraordinarily rich in its resonance, and regardless of whether one comes at it from an analytic or deconstructive background, one is equally likely to find it surprising in its …

Internal Examination: Self-Regulation And The American Media, Everette E. Dennis

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A Unique And Different Subject Of Law, Alain Pottage

Cardozo Law Review

Might an idiom of love be instituted in law? This question is posed by Luce Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference, which, in the guise of a critique of law, depicts the semantic or symbolic structure of a law that articulates an ethical relation of love-not love as caritatis, but love as eros. This implausible association of love and law seeks to institute an immediate and idiomatic relation within the axiopoietic order of law. Irigaray's J'aime d toi prescribes a set of basic rights which law-in its role as cultural tutor-might institute as the coordinates of a new model …

For The Love Of Lacan, Jacques Derrida

Cardozo Law Review

What wouldn't Lacan have said!

What won't he have said!

This is not a question, it is an exclamation: to get my voice right, to find the appropriate tone, before beginning to try out this idiomatic conjunction of negation, denial [denegation], conditional and future in the past, my hypothesis being that these grammars, now in succession, now simultaneously, play the role of a screen and of a mirror in the modalities of the with, as they do in the modalities of the since [depuis] that will have determined Lacan's relationship to the philosophers-to certain philosophers. These few reflections on temporal …

Rethinking The Beyond Of The Real, Drucilla Cornell

Cardozo Law Review

It is commonplace to note that Sigmund Freud "discovered" another reality. This reality is the reality of the psychic life. The meaning of its unconscious underpinnings surfaces in the other world of dreams and in the slips of the tongue that indicate a beyond to the day-to-day life given to us by conventions of our form of life. Certainly, Freud always returns us to the Jenseits, the other side, the beyond of the unconscious, which leaves its traces and marks on so-called "real objects," but which, on the other hand, can never be simplistically identified with them. An obvious …

Lacanian Ethics And The Desire For Law, David S. Caudill

Cardozo Law Review

American Critical Legal Studies has its own antinomies, its own indeterminacies, such that it is difficult to talk as though it is a unified position or movement, or even a single methodology or strategy. Generally, however, those who are suspicious of Critical Legal Studies have, from the beginning, aSked how the critical theorist explains his or her own ideology, and the answer is often that ideology is inescapable. Thus the critical project is about disclosure of ideology, not about the claim to know the truth outside ideology.

Making Sense Of Metaphors: Visuality, Aurality, And The Reconfiguration Of American Legal Discourse, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Cardozo Law Review

While American legal discourse has embraced a range of figurative expressions evoking all sorts of sensory experience, it has long favored visual metaphors. We frequently consider law as a matter of looking: we "observe" it; we evaluate claims "in the eye of the law"; our high courts "review" the decisions of inferior tribunals. Alternatively, we speak of law as something one would usually look at: it is a "body," a "text," a "structure," a "bulwark of freedom," a "seamless web,'' and even a "magic mirror." We identify particular legal concepts with striking visual images: property rights are a "bundle of …

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Law Review, Volume 16, Issue 1

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Law Review, Volume 15, Issue 5

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Audit Inquiry Letters And Discovery: Protection Based On Compulsion, Melissa D. Shalit

Cardozo Law Review

The Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") requires a public corporation to file quarterly and annual statements which describe the corporation's financial status. In order to comply with this requirement, the corporation hires an independent auditor to prepare accurate financial statements. The auditor must account for any event that may affect the client's financial status, including pending litigation. Therefore, in an "audit inquiry letter," the auditor requests the client-corporation to inform him of any outstanding claims and any pending or potential litigation. In this way, the auditor can include an accurate representation of his client's financial status in his report.

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Law Review, Volume 15, Issue 4

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Act: Conceptions Of The Law In The Merchant Of Venice, Bleak House, Les Miserables, And Richard Weisberg’S Poethics, Daniel H. Lowenstein

Cardozo Law Review

Richard Weisberg is a leading participant in the academic subfield known as "Law and Literature," which is dedicated to what Weisberg aptly describes as "the delightful task of associating two major human enterprises: establishing justice and telling stories."In his most recent book, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature, Weisberg attempts to provide, "more systematically . . . than elsewhere," a "guidebook to Law and Literature theory and practice." Several of the chapters in Poethics were written for other occasions and previously published; accordingly, it is no surprise that Weisberg succeeds more in demonstrating his critical acuity, the …

Nonrefundable Retainers Revisited, Lester Brickman, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Articles

Amidst widespread public attention to fee abuses, a court recently held for the first time that nonrefundable retainers violate professional ethics. The court in In re Cooperman essentially adopted the argument of Professors Brickman and Cunningham that nonrefundable retainers are against public policy because they impair a client's right to discharge his attorney at any time without penalty. Because declaring such agreements unethical is tantamount, in the eyes of the practicing bar, to declaring them void, In re Cooperman has sparked a national outcry from those who profit from enforcing nonrefundable retainers. In this Article, Professors Brickman and Cunningham analyze …

Jacob Burns, Simon J. Liebowitz

Cardozo Law Review

The demise of Mr. Jacob Bums is a great loss not only to his family but to his many friends. Folks who met him in the course of his manifold humanitarian activities were deeply impressed by his sincerity, kindness, and love for humanity. As a practicing lawyer his great ability served his clients well. Providing pro bono legal services to the poor was a way of life to him.

A Stalwart At The Bar, Arthur Norman Field

Cardozo Law Review

The New York legal community that Jack Bums found upon his admission to the Bar in 1932 was not given to welcoming all comers. It was changing rapidly. To many leaders of the Bar the change was not a positive one.

In Pursuit Of The Counter-Text: The Turn To The Jewish Legal Model In Contemporary American Legal Theory, Suzanne Last Stone

Articles

Beginning with Professor Robert Cover's Nomos and Narrative, contemporary American legal scholars have increasingly turned, implicitly or more directly, to the Jewish legal tradition as an example of a legal system in which law is defined not by reference to the authority and power of the State, but rather by the commitment of a legal community to voluntarily-accepted legal obligations. These scholars depict the Jewish legal system as having successfully confronted - and resolved - several central dilemmas currently facing American law by maintaining a coherent legal system while accepting behavioral and interpretive pluralism. In this Article, Professor Stone shows …

Overcompensating: The Corporate Lawyer And Executive Pay, Charles M. Yablon

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Advance Fee Attorney Retainer Agreements In Bankruptcy: Another Special Law For Lawyers?, Lester Brickman, Jonathan Klein

Articles

From the time that the first lawyers set foot in what is now the United States, society has engaged in efforts to regulate lawyers' fees, including fees received from clients in bankruptcy proceedings. Lawyers, in turn, have been engaged in continuing efforts to: secure their self-interests, aggrandize their role in society, be free of societally imposed constraints on their fees and activities, and carve out an ever larger area of exclusive domain. Although lawyers have not fared as well in their recent efforts to extend the scope of their monopoly by the use of statutes that prohibit the unauthorized practice …

Not Virgin Enough To Say That (S)He Occupies The Place Of The Other -Jacques Derrida, Glas, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Proving Your Case - Evidence And Procedure In Action, Christopher Finlayson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should A Jury Say What It Believes Or What It Accepts?, L. Jonathan Cohen

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Fall And Rise Of The Criminal Contingent Fee, Peter Lushing

Articles

The article argues that the ban on contingent fees for criminal defense attorneys, established by the American Bar Association in 1969, is outdated and should be repealed. It contends that the ban is rooted in historical prejudice and unfounded concerns about conflicts of interest, rather than empirical evidence. The author suggests that the Supreme Court's 1989 decision implicitly approving contingent fees in certain criminal cases presents an opportunity to reconsider this prohibition. Repealing the ban could benefit middle-class defendants and allow for regulation and data collection to address potential issues.

Judicial Asceticism, Larry Kramer

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Massachusetts Debacle: Gagnon V. Shoblom, Lester Brickman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Crossing The Bridge To Secular Law: Three Models Of Incorporation, Jeffrey I. Roth

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

On The Critical Tribunal, Stephen Watson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Laying Down The Law In Literature: The Example Of Kleist, J. Hillis Miller

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judgment After The Fall, Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.