Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Confidentiality Explained: The Dialogue Approach To Discussing Confidentiality With Clients, Elisia M. Klinka, Russell G. Pearce

San Diego Law Review

This Article offers an alternative dialogue approach. Rather than view the issue of explaining confidentiality either as a strategy for gaining client trust or an obligation necessary to comply with certain legal obligations, we propose understanding it as a key element in creating a relationship of dialogue grounded in honesty and mutual respect.

In doing so, we build on the work of the late Fred Zacharias, whose scholarship in this area provides both pathbreaking empirical insights and unwavering commitment to respecting client dignity. Among Zacharias’s contributions are his oft-cited empirical study suggesting that lawyers wrongly assume that clients would not …

Images And Aspirations: A Call For A Return To Ethics For Lawyers, Robert P. Lawry

San Diego Law Review

Dedication to the works of Prof. Fred Zacharias.

Fred Zacharias And A Lawyer's Attempt To Be Guided By Justice: Flying With Harry Potter And Understanding How Lawyers Can Prosecute The People They Represent, Randy Lee

San Diego Law Review

This Article seeks to embrace Professor Zacharias’s call for lawyers to consider more deeply what it means for a lawyer—and here particularly a government lawyer—to do justice. In so doing, it recognizes two parameters that Professor Zacharias wisely established for this task: first, that lawyers need direction that is concrete in how to behave as lawyers; and second, that lawyers can understand “justice,” “fairness,” and “truth” to be amorphous concepts and that lawyers may even attempt to define those terms with equally amorphous words. This Article also recognizes, however, that although justice, fairness, and truth can be reduced to abstraction, …

Conflicts Of Interest: Slicing The Hot Potato Doctrine, John Leubsdorf

San Diego Law Review

This essay, which boasts of being the first law review article devoted to what professional responsibility insiders call the “hot potato doctrine,” will discuss some of the unanswered questions about the doctrine’s core principle: a firm may not turn a present client into a former client by “firing” the client in order to get the benefit of the more lenient conflict of interest rules that apply to former clients. Exactly how does this modify the rules laid down by the Model Rules of Professional Conduct governing conflicts of interest and withdrawal from representations? What is the justification for refusing to …

Taking The Ethical Duty To Self Seriously: An Essay In Memory Of Fred Zacharias, Samuel J. Levine

San Diego Law Review

This essay delineates a three-tiered approach that incorporates not only the lawyer’s duty to the client and to society, but also the lawyer’s obligation to take into consideration the duty to self, which includes fidelity to the lawyer’s personal ethical values and commitments. In addition, rather than placing the various interests in hierarchical opposition, requiring that one duty invariably prevail over the others, the three-tiered approach looks to consider ways in which competing interests might balance or, at times, be reconciled with one another. To illustrate the three-tiered approach to the lawyer’s ethical obligations, this essay focuses on the lawyer’s …

Fred Zacharias's Skeptical Moralism, David Luban

San Diego Law Review

Dedication to the works of Prof. Fred Zacharias.

Fred Z., David Mcgowan

San Diego Law Review

Dedication to the works of Prof. Fred Zacharias.

The Complexities Of Lawyer Ethics Code Drafting: The Contributions Of Professor Fred Zacharias, Nancy J. Moore

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I address three aspects of the special and evolving nature of lawyer ethics codes in order to acknowledge the important contributions of Professor Zacharias. As I hope to show, Professor Zacharias’s publications present a far more complex and nuanced view of the task of drafting lawyer ethics codes than either the Commission or I had contemplated. Although there was not much time then to further address these more theoretical concerns, I am confident that we would have benefitted enormously from a deeper exploration of his scholarship in this area.

Facing The Unfaceable: Dealing With Prosecutorial Denial In Postconviction Cases Of Actual Innocence, Aviva Orenstein

San Diego Law Review

This Article develops a question that intrigued Fred: prosecutors’ duties postconviction to prisoners who might be innocent. Although Fred wrote about a panoply of questions that arise regarding the prosecutor’s duty to “do justice” after conviction, this Article will address one specific area of concern: how and why prosecutors resist allowing DNA testing and, more startlingly, deny the obvious implications of DNA evidence when that evidence exonerates the convicted.

Part II of this Article briefly summarizes two of Fred’s major articles on the subject of prosecutorial ethics. Part III documents the problem of postconviction DNA exonerations and prosecutors’ varied reactions. …

Federalizing Legal Ethics, Nationalizing Law Practice, And The Future Of The American Legal Profession In A Global Age, Eli Wald

San Diego Law Review

This Article is organized as a response to Zaharias’s influential paper, revisiting each of his four analytical steps. Following Zacharias, Part II documents the growing nationalization and globalization of law practice, and argues that the transformation of law practice renders the state-based regulation of lawyers ineffective. Part III parts ways with Zacharias’s thesis. It asserts that nationalizing, by federalizing, legal ethics is not warranted by changing practice realities and that, worse, federalizing legal ethics without more will leave some of the most troubling aspects of the transformation of law practice, including client needs, unaddressed. Instead, Part III argues that the …

Remembering Fred Z, Gary J. Simson

San Diego Law Review

Personal dedication to Prof. Fred Zacharias.

Zacharias's Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

San Diego Law Review

This Article will carry on Professor Zacharias’s profound insights and prophecies by examining the trends in direct regulation of attorneys through federal law, with a particular focus on expanding agency regulation. We will also touch on international trends that draw on federal treaty obligations to implement international norms of attorney conduct.

Prosecutorial Ethics In The Postconviction Setting From A To Zacharias, Daniel S. Medwed

San Diego Law Review

Dedication to the works of Prof. Fred Zacharias.

Confidentiality And Common Sense: Insights From Philosophy, Thomas Morawetz

San Diego Law Review

In this Article, I will consider two aspects of the controversy that help explain why it is static. I will consider the significance of empirical evidence that lawyers and clients find the rules morally troubling. Zacharias plausibly assumes that such evidence carries compelling weight. I will also look at the nature of morality itself and the extent to which professional rules should be expected to conform to morality.

When Realism And Idealism Collided In Fred Zacharias's Work On The Purposes And Limitations Of Legal Ethics Codes, Ted Schneyer

San Diego Law Review

I look back at one of Fred’s early works, a 1993 article entitled Specificity in Professional Codes: Theory, Practice, and the Paradigm of Prosecutorial Ethics. Specificity concerns the formal characteristics of legal ethics codes rather than the substantive values they embody. That topic might seem dry, but the article is intriguing because it evidences a clash between idealism and realism in Fred’s thinking. Although both strands of thought were prominent in much of Fred’s work, the clash between them was never starker than in Specificity. There, Fred the idealist offered up an elaborate methodology for drafting of legal ethics codes …

Behind Closed Doors: Shedding Light On Lawyer Self-Regulation-What Lawyers Do When Nobody's Watching, John Sahl

San Diego Law Review

This Article summarizes Nobody’s Watching. It also examines some of the consequences of failing to enforce ethical rules for lawyer conduct and offers some lessons for future rule development and enforcement. Part III considers some of the academic and practical significance of Nobody’s Watching. The Article concludes by noting that Nobody’s Watching offers academics, lawyers, and regulators a valuable tool to better understand and improve the regulation of the profession.

Anatomy Of An Aggregate Settlement: The Triumph Of Temptation Over Ethics, Lester Brickman

Articles

In an aggregate settlement, usually of a mass tort claim, a defendant agrees to pay a specific dollar amount to be divided up by the lawyer among her multiple clients which may number in the hundreds and even thousands. Each client, therefore, is in competition with all of the lawyer’s other clients suing the same defendant for a share of the fixed sum. Rule 1.8(g) of the ABA Rules of Professional Conduct requires that each client give their informed consent to their allocation. To facilitate the settlement and the often quite substantial contingency fees to be earned, lawyers may mislead …

Jan. 10, 2011, Ifc, Review-Update Policy And Performance Standards, Ifc

IFC E&S Performance Standards

No abstract provided.

The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct Through The Lens Of The Proverbs, Scott E. Thompson

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

New Ways To Teach Drafting And Drafting Ethics, Lisa Penland, David I.C. Thomson, Susan Duncan, Karen J. Sneddon, Susan M. Chesler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

As foreign as it can seem to not be in a physical classroom with bodies sitting in the chairs listening, it is a very different way of teaching but it can be very effective. If you go through this process of developing and dividing outcomes, dividing modules, and selecting the right technology, it can work. And that is kind of a scary thought to some people. Perhaps not people who have come to this section today or to this conference about What's Next, but for many of our colleagues, this is kind of a scary thought – that you might …

Clinical Professors' Professional Responsibility: Preparing Law Students To Embrace Pro Bono, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

This article begins by examining the current crisis in the U.S. legal system where approximately three out of four low- and middle-income litigants are denied access to counsel's representation when faced with the loss of essential rights - -a home, child custody, liberty and deportation - - and where most lawyers decline to fulfill their ethical responsibility of pro bono service to those who cannot afford private counsel. The article traces the evolving ethical standards of a lawyer's professional responsibility that today views every attorney as a public citizen having a special responsibility to the quality of justice.

The author …

Modeling The American Lawyer Ethics System, James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

None available.

New Ways To Teach Drafting And Drafting Ethics, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

Good morning. My name is Karen Sneddon. Today, Sue Chesler and I are going to showcase a technique to incorporate issues of ethics and professionalism into a drafting course. And that technique is Teaching Drafting Ethics Using Video Vignettes. Of course we know at this point that Carnegie’s Educating Lawyers, CLEA's Best Practices have reinvigorated examination of law school curricula, mostly especially with the inclusion of transactional based skills increasing the awareness of issues involving professionalism and ethics. As those transactional focused courses are being added to the curriculum, professors are striving for a way to infuse those issues of …

Legal Ethics And Non-Practicing Entities: Being On The Receiving End Matters Too, David Hricik

Articles

The symposium invited me to speak on the legal ethical issues that face counsel who represent non-practicing entities ("NPEs") in patent litigation as plaintiff patentees. My first reaction was that, although obviously the same common law, statutes, ethical rules, and procedural rules apply to such counsel as any other, owing to the tremendous costs of patent litigation, that counsel who represented such a "troll" necessarily would have enhanced obligations to court and opposing counsel to ensure that the suit was not brought in bad faith, nor so conducted.

Upon analysis, however, I came to the somewhat counter­intuitive conclusion that, although …

Enlightenment Liberalism, Lawyers, And The Future Of Lawyer-Client Relations, Robert F. Cochran Jr.

Campbell Law Review

I am going to address, from a Christian perspective, liberalism's relationship to the role and responsibility of the lawyer. Whether a United States lawyer could define Enlightenment liberalism or not, it is likely that the role he or she plays as an attorney every day was in large part shaped by liberalism's focus on individual autonomy. At the request of the conference organizers, I am also going to reflect on the future of lawyerclient relations.

Breaking Past The Parallax: Finding The True Place Of Lawyers In Securities Fraud, Marianne C. Adams

Fordham Urban Law Journal

Lawyers often play an integral part in business transactions and securities offerings. This puts lawyers on the sidelines of not only great business successes, but also, every so often, tremendous failures. Because they are viewed by many as gatekeepers, and in that role provide a degree of assurance (with their reputational capital) that gross illegalities will not occur, a series of questions arise in the minds of many when illegalities do happen on attorneys’ watch. This Note analyzes the legal standards that are in play and those that should be imposed when lawyers aid or abet a fraud. Part I …

Pretrial Procedures For Innocent People: Reforming Brady, Lissa Griffin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this article, the author proposes that the prosecution’s obligation to disclose exculpatory information to the defense be formalized by statute, court rule, or internal protocol in ways that would reflect the current state of our knowledge of and experience with both Brady and wrongful convictions. This would improve on the current ineffective constitutional protection—and any existing statutory or rule-based regimes—in several ways. First, such a formalized regime would require disclosure of all materials that are reasonably helpful to the defense. Second, unlike the constitutional doctrine, which provides no reliable mechanism for monitoring police disclosure to the prosecution, an accompanying …

Brief Of Amica Curiae, Deborah A. Demott In Support Of The Petitioner, Maples V. Thomas, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Crisis In The Legal Profession: Don’T Mourn, Organize!, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Guy Lancaster On Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 Pp., Guy Lancaster

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Genocide: A Normative Account. By Larry May. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 283 pp.