Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Ethics Of Normative Legal Scholarship, Robin West

Marquette Law Review

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A Status Update For Texas Voir Dire: Advocating For Pre-Trial Internet Investigation Of Prospective Jurors, Luke A. Harle

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Internet provides trial attorneys an additional tool to investigate the backgrounds of prospective jurors during voir dire. Online searches of a person’s name and social media accounts can reveal information that could be used as grounds for a challenge for cause or to facilitate intelligent use of peremptory strikes. Texas lawmakers have not yet provided any official guidance as to whether attorneys can investigate prospective jurors online or how they might do so, should it be allowed. Texas’s current voir dire structure, judicial opinions, and ethics opinions, together, support the notion that Texas trial attorneys should be given opportunities …

Individual Lawyers, The Sec Revolving Door, And Comment Letters, Michael Shen, Samuel T. Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Government officials, advocacy groups, and the business press have raised concerns that former SEC employees may continue to influence the SEC after leaving the agency. Using a hand-collected database of individual lawyers that represent firms in responding to SEC comment letters, we examine the impact of individual lawyers, and lawyers formerly employed by the SEC, on the comment letter process. We document significant differences between lawyers and law firms in their clients’ resistance to SEC comment letters, and find that firms that retain former SEC employees are larger, more profitable, and more likely to have received a comment letter raising …

Volume 1, Issue 2 (2017) Inaugural Issue

International Journal on Responsibility

Contents:

Introduction: Terry Beitzel, Types of Responsibility: Challenges and Opportunities

3 – 5 Howard Zehr, Restorative Justice and the Gandhian Tradition.

6 – 26 Richard E. Rubenstein, Responsibility for Peacemaking in the Context of Structural Violence.

27 – 64 Marc Pufong, Terror, Insecurity, State Responsibility and Challenges: Yesterday and Today?

65 – 77 Ron Kraybill, Responsibility, Community and Conflict Resolution in an Age of Polarization.

78 – 96 John Fairfield, Beyond non-violence to courtship.

97 – 98 Call for papers for forthcoming issues of the International Journal on Responsibility and instructions for authors.

Conviction Beyond A Reasonable Suspicion? The Need For Strengthening The Factual Basis Requirement In Guilty Pleas, Myeonki Kim

Concordia Law Review

Does the court, before accepting a guilty plea, check the accuracy of the plea agreement in any significant way? This article addresses the issues on judges being unconcerned or the inconsistent practice of guiding the stages of guilty plea. The article further suggests that the judge should carefully review its factual basis to avoid a wrongful guilty plea. Although Rule 11(b) of the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure requires the judges to check the factual basis of the guilty plea, the rule is not paid much attention to legal professionals. Setting the adversarial culture aside, the rule itself has a …

Better Briefs, Lydia Fearing

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming

Uncharted Waters? Legal Ethics And The Benefit Corporation, Joseph Pileri

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Corporate law norms are reflected in lawyers’ ethical duties. The enactment of benefit corporation legislation across the country signals a legislative acknowledgment that corporate law can serve as a public, rather than a merely private, ordering mechanism. Benefit corporations expressly adopt a public benefit as a legal purpose of the enterprise. While many have written about this important development with respect to corporate fiduciary law, this essay is the first to explore the professional and ethical responsibility of lawyers representing benefit corporations. In the last century, as scholars and courts drove an understanding of corporate law that elevated the interests …

Keep Suing All The Lawyers: Recent Developments In Claims Against Lawyers For Aiding & Abetting A Client’S Breach Of Fiduciary Duty, Katerina P. Lewinbuk

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Lawyers have increasingly become subject to liability under various legal theories, ranging from traditional legal malpractice or negligence liability claims to various third-party actions. Most recently, state and federal courts across the country have recognized attorney liability for aiding and abetting a client’s breach of fiduciary duty. This Article will address the current status of the cause of action for a lawyer’s aiding and abetting her client’s breach of fiduciary duty, explain the commonalities and distinguish nuances as outlined by particular states, examine recent decisions by federal courts that have recognized the cause of action, and culminate in its conclusion …

The Right To An Independent Judiciary And The Avoidance Of Constitutional Conflict: The Burger Court’S Flawed Reasoning In Chandler V. Judicial Council Of The Tenth Circuit And Its Unfortunate Legacy, Joshua E. Kastenberg

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In 1970, the United States Supreme Court issued Chandler v. Judicial Council of the Tenth Circuit in which five Justices determined that the federal courts of appeals possessed an administrative authority to manage the district court judges within an appellate court’s respective circuit. The decision enabled the Tenth Circuit to decide the fitness of a judge to preside over cases without a formal motion from a litigant. Although Congress had enabled the courts of appeals to oversee basic judicial functions (such as temporarily assigning district court judges to overworked districts), Congress did not intend to grant the power to remove …

The Limited Duties Of Lawyers To Protect The Funds And Property Of Nonclients, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Issues arise daily in law practice about the duties owed by lawyers to nonclients with respect to funds or property entrusted to them. In resolving those issues, care must be exercised when interpreting state versions of Model Rule 1.15, the American Bar Association’s pattern ethics rule on safekeeping of funds and property. Otherwise, a lawyer’s duties to third persons may too readily encroach on the performance of obligations owed to clients, as well as on the legitimate interests of lawyers themselves.

As numerous authorities have recognized, lawyers are obliged to protect the property interests of third persons only if they …

It’S A Trap! The Ethical Dark Side Of Requests For Admission, Colin Flora

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Due largely to an overlap of authority between disciplinary bodies charged with supervising the professional conduct of attorneys and the authority of courts to supervise litigation, the ethical ramifications of routine discovery abuses often pass without comment. That is because disciplinary authorities routinely defer to courts to police litigation behavior despite courts frequently rejecting the role of enforcers of professional rules. A further contributing factor to unethical conduct becoming routine practice in discovery are ill-defined parameters and a dearth of guidance. One tool in particular, requests for admission, has gone overlooked in the literature and caselaw, but poses unique ethical …

Review Of Privileged Documents In Trial And Deposition Preparation Of Witnesses In New York: When, If Ever, Will The Privilege Be Lost?, Michael J. Hutter

Pace Law Review

This article will examine New York’s refreshing recollection doctrine in the context of trial and deposition preparation of witnesses as to the consequences of the witness’s review of privileged writings. Initially, Part II will discuss Rule 612 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The discussion will serve as the backdrop for the analysis of the above-mentioned issues under New York law. Part III will then examine the refreshing recollection doctrine as developed and applied to testifying witnesses at a trial or deposition by the New York courts. The examination will point out the doctrine’s key rules. Part IV discusses the …

Legal Ethics And The Political Activity Of Government Lawyers, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The ability to engage in political activity is an essential feature of a democratic society. However, the ability of government lawyers to do so is unclear. While most governments have passed legislation identifying permissible political activity of their employees, it is unclear how the professional obligations of lawyers apply in this context and how these professional obligations interact with this legislation. This article answers these questions. The duty of loyalty to the client requires most government lawyers to refrain from all political activity at the same level of government. The special professional obligations of Crown prosecutors require these lawyers to …

Cotter, Jr. V. Dist. Ct., 134 Nev. Adv. Op. 32 (May 3, 2018) (En Banc), Paloma Guerrero

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court adopted the common interest rule as an exception to waiver of the work-product privilege. The common interest rule requires that the “transferor and transferee [must] anticipate litigation against a common adversary on the same issue or issues” and to “have strong common interests in sharing the fruit of the preparation efforts.”

Confronting Silence: The Constitution, Deaf Criminal Defendants, And The Right To Interpretation During Trial, Deirdre M. Smith

Maine Law Review

For most deaf people, interactions with the hearing community in the absence of interpretation or technological assistance consist of communications that are, at most, only partly comprehensible. Criminal proceedings, with the defendant's liberty interest directly at stake, are occasions in which the need for deaf people to have a full understanding of what is said and done around them is most urgent. Ironically, the legal “right to interpretation” has not been clearly defined in either statutory or case law. Although the federal and state constitutions do not provide a separate or lesser set of rights for deaf defendants, their situation …

Trends In Legislations Affecting Library And Information Practice In Uganda, Francis Ssekitto

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Introduction: legislation and ethics as one of the top five themes that preoccupied LIS scholars and practitioners in the first decade of the 21^st century.

This is true for Library and Information Science and its related disciplines such as Records, information and archives, archeology and museum study.

Objective: This paper attempts to discuss the various trends in legislations relating to the Library and Information Science discipline and profession.

Methodology: In this research, reviewing literature was used to define the main concepts of this research.

Findings: There is a noticeable attribute that more legislations are likely to be drafted …

Lawyers' Abuse Of Technology, Cheryl B. Preston

Cornell Law Review

Lawyers are highly educated and, allegedly, of higher than average intelligence, but sometimes individual lawyers demonstrate colossal errors in judgment, especially when insufficiently trained in the new and emerging risks involved with the technological age. For instance, although the internet is a necessary tool for attorneys' and is now a prominent feature in the everyday lives of all actors in the legal system, this technology poses particularized and often unanticipated risks of professional and ethical abuse -- risks that are extraordinary both in quantity and intensity. As Harvard's Director of the Center for the Legal Profession warned: We are "only …

A Penal Colony For Bad Lawyers, Bennett L. Gershman

Mercer Law Review

The concept of "disruptive innovation" is vague. Imagining the idea of lawyer "disruption" might conjure a scene from Al Pacino's aggressive role in the 1979 film And Justice for All 9 or embody the tradition of lawyers courageously representing unpopular clients, sometimes placing their lives at risk in courtrooms and on streets. But the panel, I discovered, was more interested in the concept of disruption as descriptive of radical departures from conventional lawyering and conventional discipline.

Recently, as I walked along the narrow cobblestoned streets of Prague--the same streets that Franz Kafka traversed while he was consumed by thoughts of …

Professional Responsibility Pitfalls: Often But Not Always Apparent, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Ethics, Laurie L. Levenson

Mercer Law Review

Prosecutors hate being told what to do. As "ministers of justice," they feel imbued with a moral compass that rarely, if ever, needs tweaking by outsiders. Their mission to protect society and the Constitution provides sufficient guidance. Being told how to be "ethical" is downright insulting for attorneys who already perceive themselves as wearing the white hat. Efforts to create ethical standards to guide a prosecutor's work may be perceived as little more than an unnecessary intrusion upon the prosecutor's independence and personal sense of justice. For some prosecutors, it is unwarranted meddling into the prosecution's business. As former Attorney …

The Bend At The End: What Lawyers Can Learn About Disruptions And Innovations In Criminal Defense Practice From Market Analysis, Donald F. Tibbs, Justin Hollinger

Mercer Law Review

In the world of stock market analysis, there is one certainty: the stock market is unpredictable. It acts with a will of its own, and despite experts' attempts at market forecast, no single person or machine can accurately predict the highs and lows of each day. Nonetheless, market experts extol new techniques; develop computer algorithms; and attach interesting monikers, such as Stochastics, MACD, and Bollinger Bands. But, in the end, they all succumb to the same rule: the unpredictability of the market suggests that no trading strategy is 100%, without fail, perfect every single trade.

That said, however, there is …

Negotiating The Legal Systems In Asean, Kee Yang Low, Philip Charles Zerrillo

Asian Management Insights

One may ask: What is a thought piece on legal systems doing in a business magazine?

When Courts Run Amuck: A Book Review Of Unequal: How America's Courts Undermine Discrimination Law By Sandra F. Sperino And Suja A. Thomas (Oxford 2017), Theresa M. Beiner

Texas A&M Law Review

In Unequal: How America’s Courts Undermine Discrimination Law (“Unequal”), law professors Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas provide a point-by-point analysis of how the federal courts’ interpretations of federal anti-discrimination laws have undermined their efficacy to provide relief to workers whose employers have allegedly engaged in discrimination. The cases’ results are consistently pro-employer, even while the Supreme Court of the United States—a court not known for being particularly pro-plaintiff—has occasionally ruled in favor of plaintiff employees. The authors suggest some reasons for this apparent anti-plaintiff bias among the federal courts, although they do not settle on a particular reason …

China's Anti-Corruption Crackdown And The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Daniel C.K. Chow

Texas A&M Law Review

China’s highly publicized crackdown on corruption may affect the type and number of cases in China that arise under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”), but it should not be assumed that the crackdown will necessarily lead to fewer FCPA prosecutions. Although there is some overlap of the goals of China’s corruption crackdown and the goals of the FCPA, China’s crackdown also serves important goals of the ruling Communist Party. The main goal of the current crackdown is to reinforce the Party’s power by targeting enemies and rivals of the current leadership. The crackdown is not aimed at prohibiting bribes …

Entering The Trump Ice Age: Contextualizing The New Immigration Enforcement Regime, Bill Ong Hing

Texas A&M Law Review

During the early stages of the Trump ICE age, America seemed to be witnessing and experiencing an unparalleled era of immigration enforcement. But is it unparalleled? Did we not label Barack Obama the “deporter-inchief?” Was it not George W. Bush who used the authority of the Patriot Act to round up nonimmigrants from Muslim and Arab countries, and did his ICE not commonly engage in armed raids at factories and other worksites? Are there not strong parallels that can be drawn between Trump enforcement plans and actions and those of other eras? What about the fear and hysteria that seems …

Unstitching Scarlet Letters?: Prosecutorial Discretion And Expungement, Brian M. Murray

Fordham Law Review

This Article argues that scholarly discussions about prosecutorial discretion need to extend their focus beyond the exercise of prosecutorial judgment pretrial or questions of factual and legal guilt. Given that the primary role of the prosecutoris to do “justice,” this Article calls for increased attention to the exercise of discretion after the guilt phase is complete, specifically in the context of expungement of nonconviction andconviction information. It offers a framework for exercising such discretion and, in doing so, hopes to initiate additional conversation about the role of prosecutors during the phases that follow arrest and prosecution.

Prosecutorial Summation: Where Is The Line Between "Personal Opinion" And Proper Argument?, James W. Gunson

Maine Law Review

Prosecutorial forensic misconduct has become front page news in Maine. Since April of 1993, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, sitting as the Law Court, has reversed convictions in three highly publicized cases based on remarks made by the prosecutor. In State v. Steen, the prosecutor asked the defendant to give his opinion concerning the veracity of other witnesses and suggested in closing argument that the favorable testimony given by the defense's expert witness resulted from the fee he had received. The Law Court vacated the gross sexual assault conviction, finding that the prosecutor's questions and closing argument “clearly suggested” to …

Asarco Llc V. Atlantic Richfield Company, Ryan L. Hickey

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liabiltiy Act, commonly known as CERCLA, facilitates cleanup of hazardous waste sites and those contaminated by other harmful substances by empowering the Environmental Protection Agency to identify responsible parties and require them to undertake or fund remediation. Because pollution sometimes occurrs over long periods of time by multiple parties, CERCLA also enables polluters to seek financial contribution from other contaminators of a particular site. The Ninth Circuit clarified the particuar circumstances under which contribution actions may arise in Asarco LLC v. Atlantic Richfield Co., holding non-CERCLA settlements may give rise to CERCLA contribution …

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

Acknowledgments, Howard S. Carrier

International Journal on Responsibility

Serious work to bring the International Journal on Responsibility to life commenced during the summer of 2015. In the intervening period between conceptualization and publication, many organizations and individuals within James Madison University and the wider community have contributed enormously to bringing the journal to fruition.