Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Kentucky Law Survey: Professional Responsibility, William H. Fortune

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article is a survey of recent Kentucky ethics cases and Kentucky Bar Association ethics opinions. The cases and opinions selected are those of general application but special interest.

The Need For New Bankruptcy Ethics Rules: How Can "One Size Fits All" Fit Anybody?, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Short discussion why dormant, temporary, actual conflicts (DTACs) in bankruptcy cases can't be handled appropriately under state ethics rules.

Our House, Our Rules: The Need For A Uniform Code Of Bankruptcy Ethics, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This article argues that there should be a separate code of professional responsibility for lawyers in bankruptcy cases.

Publicity In High Profile Criminal Cases, H. Patrick Furman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Dependency And Delegation: The Ethics Of Marital Representation, Naomi Cahn, Robert Tuttle

Seattle University Law Review

The two hypotheticals for this symposium concern a lawyer who is asked to represent a married couple in which one spouse would like to cede decision-making authority to the other. As we have examined the lawyer's ethical responsibilities, we have identified two distinct, but conceptually related, issues of legal ethics. The first, a threshold question, deals with the nature of marital representation: May a lawyer simultaneously represent both husband and wife? And if so, how should the representation be structured? The second adds an additional layer of complexity: If a lawyer represents both husband and wife, may the lawyer accept …

Introductory Note: Symposium On Lawyering And Personal Values – Responding To The Problems Of Ethical Schizophrenia, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

In recent years, legal practitioners and scholars alike have identified a growing crisis in the legal profession. Increasingly, lawyers feel dissatisfied with the roles they are expected to play and the conduct demanded of them. In particular, many lawyers see a widening gap between their personal values and those employed in legal practice. In response to the dichotomy between personal and professional values, some lawyers attempt to develop a corresponding dichotomy in their personalities, separating the “professional self” from the “personal self.” Such a response, however, may lead to a kind of “ethical schizophrenia,” a condition in which an individual …

Race Trials, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Turning The Microscope On Ourselves: Self-Assessment By Bankruptcy Lawyers Of Potential Conflicts Of Interest In Columbus, Ohio, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This article attempts to devise an appropriate instrument to determine whether bankruptcy lawyers in Columbus, Ohio are able to identify potential conflicts of interest in bankruptcy cases. Although the article is unable to develop an appropriate instrument, it does discuss why the survey method is not appropriate for this type of study.

Ethics: Is Disinterestedness Still A Viable Concept? A Roundtable Discussion, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

The transcript of a panel discussion about disinterestedness among Prof. John D. Ayer, the Hon. Charles N. Clevert, the Hon. Joel Pelofsky, Bettina Whyte, and Nancy B. Rapoport.

Has The Dip's Attorney Become The Ultimate Creditors' Lawyer In Bankruptcy Reorganization Proceedings?, Nancy B. Rapoport, C. R. Bowles

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the issues facing the lawyer for the estate in a bankruptcy case. It debunks the idea that the lawyer for the estate represents any single constituency, and it tries to redefine the fiduciary duties that the estate lawyer has to the bankruptcy estate.

Principled Opinions: Response To Brickman, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Brickman is not pleased. Indeed, he is outraged, if the sound and fury of his article is to be taken at face value. He and twenty-five others, lawyers and legal educators, sent the American bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility (the "Committee" or "Ethics Committee") a letter (the "Letter") asking for an opinion. They got one which Professor Brickman describes as "wrong as a matter of ethics law, malevolent as a matter of public policy, disingenuous in its presentation, unfounded it [its] critical assumptions ... and blatantly self-interested in elevating lawyers' financial interests above their traditional …

Legal Ethics And Fugitive Slaves: The Anthony Burns Case, Judge Loring, And Abolitionist Attorneys, Paul Finkelman

Cardozo Law Review

Judges and lawyers seek to enforce and uphold the "law" while also proclaiming an interest in an abstraction we call "justice." As we know, there is often a tension between the two. Consequently, serving the law often means not serving justice. Similarly, often a tension exists between a lawyer's duty both to seek a legal remedy to a problem and to act in the best interests of a client. Activist lawyers can have an agenda that is at odds with members of the class they claim to serve. These two problems are complicated by a third. Lawyers and judges have …

Can A Lawyer Ever Do Right?, Owen M. Fiss

Cardozo Law Review

Jacques Maury and Maurice Gargon were good people, but not good enough. They resisted the harshness of the racial laws of Vichy France but not as fully as they should have. Falling victim to the proclivity of all lawyers, they became ensnared within the technical trappings of the law. They helped individual clients who suffered under the Vichy laws, but are faulted by Richard Weisberg for failing to challenge those laws at a foundational level. Professor Weisberg described the result as grotesque.

Practice Guidelines For Co-Mediation: Making Certain That “Two Heads Are Better Than One”, Lela P. Love, Joseph B. Stulberg

Articles

Co-mediation can either enhance or diminish the effectiveness of the mediation process. This article outlines advantages and disadvantages of comediation and proposes guidelines for co-mediators to enable maximizing the potential of a co-mediation team.

Reap What You Sow, Gordon J. Beggs

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Unfortunately, with the adoption and revision of formal ethics codes, moral teaching has virtually disappeared from American legal ethics. Law professors, generally, do not consider it their responsibility to teach morality, and our profession today lacks a common moral standard. The Judeo-Christian principles expressed in Proverbs, however, provide a timely challenge to lawyers by advocating values that include justice, purity, mercy, honesty and civility.

Why Informed Consent? Human Experimentation And The Ethics Of Autonomy, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

Not long ago, the welfare reform debate took a provocative turn. New Jersey welfare recipients challenged the state's Family Cap rule, which denied additional cash aid to parents who conceive children while on welfare. Welfare rights activists argued that the rule "with[held] benefits to see if [this would] alter human behavior." They insisted that the innovative, but stern, Family Cap rules were effectively experiments on welfare recipients without their consent.

This is a powerful argument. After all, consent enjoys talismanic—if not sacramental—status in modem life and thought; it is our "master concept." But why? Why should consenting mean so much …

What About The Children? Are Family Lawyers The Same (Ethically) As Criminal Lawyers? A Morality Play, Robert H. Aronson

Articles

A fictional account of a lawyer, representing a woman in a divorce case, who learns from her client that her live-in boyfriend has hit her and her five-year-old daughter. Is her ethical duty to protect the child greater than her responsibility to maintain the attorney-client privilege. She discusses the matter with two evidence professors in search of a solution.

Teaching Ethics In Schools Of Business In Oklahoma Colleges And Universities, Shelsea Ellis

McCabe Thesis Collection

The research in this study seeks to establish the degree to which ethics is included in the business curriculum of four-year colleges and universities in Oklahoma. If ethics is taught as a separate course, the study inquires about the methodology used in that course. If there is not a separate ethics course, the study determines if ethics is included in several courses of the business curriculum. Clarification is also determined as to the percentage of time dedicated to the teaching of ethics and whether or not the dean of the School of Business believes this percentage to be appropriate.

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 …

How The Butler Was Made To Do It: The Perverted Professionalism Of The Remains Of The Day, Rob Atkinson

St. Thomas Law Review

No abstract provided.

Prosecutorial Misconduct In Presenting Evidence: "Backdooring" Hearsay, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Rules of evidence are designed to bring about just and informed decisions. One of these rules, the hearsay rule, is designed to ensure that juries receive reliable evidence, and that out-of-court statements ordinarily are inadmissible. Prosecutors are well aware of these evidentiary restrictions, but occasionally seek to circumvent them. The author describes methods used by some prosecutors to manipulate the hearsay rule and thereby distort the truth-finding process of the trial.

Proverbial Practice: Legal Ethics From Old Testament Wisdom, Gordon J. Beggs

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Old Testament book of Proverbs supplied foundational moral values for our nation's legal ethics. With the adoption and revision of formal codes, moral teaching has virtually disappeared from legal ethics. This essay suggests that the wisdom of Proverbs offers a timely challenge to the character of the legal profession by advocating values which include justice, purity, mercy, humility, honesty, candor, truthful testimony, and civility.

Aba Delegates Amend Model Rule , Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The ABA House of Delegates has amended Model Rule 4.2 regarding whom attorneys may ethically contact directly during the course of litigation or other legal matters. This article discusses the ramifications of this change.

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: The Proper Role Of The Bankruptcy Attorney, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the tension between the lawyer's duty to her client and her duty to the legal system as an officer of the court. It concludes that, in a situation in which those two duties conflict, the lawyer's duty to the system as a whole should trump the duty to the client.

Lawyers, Learning, And Professionalism: Meditations On A Theme, Judith Welch Wegner

Cleveland State Law Review

This essay will offer three meditations on the theme of "lawyers, learning and professionalism." First, it lays a foundation by arguing that a commitment to learning is an appropriate and necessary professional value for lawyers. Next, it contends that lawyers need to take this professional value more seriously. It will suggest that lawyers lag behind other professions in learning about learning, and urge more lawyers deliberately do just that. Finally, the essay shares some important lessons about professionalism recently learned through learning experiments with practicing lawyers and law students.

Self-Inflicted Wounds: The Duty To Disclose Damaging Legal Authority, Angela Gilmore

Cleveland State Law Review

This article analyzes Rule 3.3(a)(3) and its implications for opposing parties in an adversarial legal system. The article's conclusion is that strict compliance with Rule 3.3(a)(3) by all members of the Bar is necessary to preserve the integrity of the legal system. Circumvention of the Rule is a disservice to the legal system. Part II explains Rule 3.3(a)(3) so that lawyers can grasp the ethical duty owed. Part III examines three roles simultaneously played by a lawyer: a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system, and a private citizen having a special responsibility for the quality of justice.7 …

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 …

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 …

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 …