Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Some Ethical Considerations For Judicial Clerks, John Paul Jones

Law Faculty Publications

Since 1875, new law graduates have served judges of federal and state courts as legal researchers, executive assistants, and professional confidants. In return, the best of the newest lawyers have gotten a chance to complement their classroom education with field study of bench and bar-from behind the bench. The ideal relationship which should develop between law clerks and their judges is symbiotic: the judges enjoying the energies and fresh perspectives of brand new professionals rated top among their contemporaries by law professors, and the law clerks obtaining tutorials by senior jurists regarded as among the best by their former peers …

Confessions Of An Ethics Chairman, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article responds to the critics of state bar ethics committees. Indirectly, it raises some questions about the need, or at least the extent of the need, for yet another law-related cottage industry (the for hire legal ethics consultant). It also provides some friendly advice for those well-meaning types in every jurisdiction who are perennially "reforming" or "energizing" their bar associations and demanding for the "membership" a dazzling new array of services. It discusses practical problems that have gone unmentioned in the limited literature, just as it takes issue with many of the assertions that have been made in that …

Exporting Cigarettes: Do Profits Trump Ethics And International Law?, Robbie D. Schwartz

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In recent years, United States cigarette manufacturers have focused their efforts on foreign markets, especially Asia, Eastern Europe, and Third World states. This Note examines the impetus behind the manufacturers' strategy, as well as the ethical and legal conflicts it creates.

The increase in United States cigarette exports results from a decline in the United States market, favorable market conditions abroad, and United States legislation that encourages foreign trade. While cigarette manufacturers point to the positive impact tobacco has on the United States economy, others argue that increased exportation inevitably will result in catastrophic health consequences worldwide. This Note explores …

Self-Regulation Of Judicial Misconduct Could Be Mis-Regulation, Anthony D'Amato

Michigan Law Review

Judge Harry T. Edwards has written a lucid and seemingly logical plea for the judiciary to be granted exclusive self-regulation over all matters of judicial misconduct that fall short of crimes or impeachable offenses. His essay demonstrates the seriousness with which he regards misconduct that would bring shame to the federal judiciary. He believes that the judiciary as a whole is the best institution to ascertain and take measures against individual aberrant judges who are guilty of various forms of misconduct, and I have no doubt of the sincerity of his belief. Yet when we look at claims for self-regulation …

Administrative Failure And Local Democracy: The Politics Of Deshaney, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is an effort to construct a normative basis for a constitutional theory to resist the Supreme Court's recent decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services.¹ In DeShaney, the Court decided that a local social service worker's failure to prevent child abuse did not violate the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment even though the social worker "had reason to believe" the abuse was occurring. ² Chief Justice Rehnquist's opinion for the Court held that government inaction cannot violate due process unless the state has custody of the victim, ³ thus settling a controversial …

Book Review, Mitchell M. Simon

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

Review of the book Codes of Professional Responsibility (Rena A. Gorlin, ed., BNA Books, 1990). This 555 page book includes 43 codes of conduct promulgated by the major professional associations in business, health, and law. Each code is preceded by a brief description of the relevant association, including its address and phone number, and information relating to implementation and enforcement. The book concludes with three helpful resource lists including: first, research centers, educational programs and governmental bodies dealing with ethical issues; second, journals and periodical services; and, third, bibliographies, databases and libraries with special ethics collections. The resource sections and …

Judgment After The Fall, Barbara Herrnstein Smith

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.

Firm-Specific Human Capital Investments And Hegelian Ethics: A Comment On Cornell And Posner, Jonathan R. Macey

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Internal And External Analysis Of Concepts, Randy Barnett

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

With What Must Ethics Begin? Reflections On Benson's Account Of Property And Contract, Richard Dien Winfield

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Kentucky's New Rules Of Professional Conduct For Lawyers, Eugene R. Gaetke

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

On July 12, 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court adopted its own version of the American Bar Association's 1983 Model Rules of Professional Conduct as the body of disciplinary law applicable to lawyers practicing in the state. These new rules constitute a major improvement in the state's law of legal ethics. Their adoption should be considered a victory for Kentucky lawyers and, more importantly, a victory for the people of the state, the ultimate beneficiaries of the regulation of the legal profession.

As with most victories, the adoption of the new rules was not unequivocally positive. Kentucky's version of the Model …

Virtue Ethics In A Perfectionist Theory Of Law And Justice, Donald F. Brosnan

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Professional Ethics Opinion 89-3, Attorney Responsibility To Disabled Or Dysfunctional Client, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

When an attorney files suit on behalf of a client and later has reason to believe the client is incompetent, what should the attorney do? Can the case be settled? Can the attorney move for the appointment of a guardian ad litem? The article is an excerpt from an ethics opinion which answers these questions.

Teaching Ethics In Civil Procedure Courses, Richard Matasar

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Abstract Right And The Possibility Of A Nondistributive Conception Of Contract: Hegel And Contemporary Contract Theory, Peter Benson

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Hegilian State, Fred Dallmayr

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Wanted: An Ethos Of Personal Responsibility—Why Codes Of Ethics And Schools Of Law Don't Make For Ethical Lawyers, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

This article: (1) argues that neither codes of professional ethics nor traditional modes of law school teaching do much to produce ethical lawyers; (2) asserts that ethics codes and the presuppositions of the adversary system work to alienate lawyers from a sense of individual responsibility; (3) critiques the conceptual connection between the adversary system and codes of lawyer ethics; (4) critiques the conventional approach to teaching legal ethics in law schools; (5) invokes the approach to ethical analysis championed by the German sociologist and social theorist Max Weber; and (6) explains how that approach, coupled with traditional tools of legal …

Lawyers As Officers Of The Court, Eugene R. Gaetke

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Lawyers like to refer to themselves as officers of the court. Careful analysis of the role of the lawyer within the adversarial legal system reveals the characterization to be vacuous and unduly self-laudatory. It confuses lawyers and misleads the public. The profession, therefore, should either stop using the officer of the court characterization or give meaning to it. This Article proposes certain modifications of the existing rules of professional responsibility that would bring lawyers' actual obligations more in line with those suggested by the label of officer of the court.

The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Ethics, David T. Link

Journal Articles

The law school curriculum at Notre Dame is based on a two-faceted mission statement that the faculty developed in 1974. Moral values are central to both facets: (1) to be an outstanding teaching school that prepares competent and compassionate attorneys whose decisions are guided by the values and morality that Notre Dame represents; (2) to promote leading contributions to the development of the law, the system of justice, the legal profession, and legal education, through faculty scholarship and institutional projects that embody important qualities of the Notre Dame value system. We intend to dedicate as much intensity to sensitizing our …

Less Suffering When You're Warned: A Response To Professor Lewis, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Professor Lewis' comment is a lucid brief for warning clients that their lawyers have moral limits. It begins with a generous description of the discussion Professor Freedman and I had on the subject of moral limits. I am able, as a result, to summarize the exchanges quickly: Professor Freedman's original proposition, in these pages, was that once the lawyer-client relationship is in place, it is immoral for the lawyer to refuse to seek the client's legal objectives; it is immoral for the lawyer to invoke her own conscience to prevent the client from obtaining what the law allows the client …

Should A Christian Lawyer Serve The Guilty?, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

People who teach or practice law are in some ways like public executioners or the Air Force officers who watch over the buttons that will send nuclear missiles into action: Other people, ordinary people, want to know what we do to overcome what seem to ordinary people to be moral obstacles to doing what we do.

What ordinary people say to lawyers, and what my students say when they first come to law school, when they are still more ordinary people than they are law students, is this: How can lawyers lend their skills and talents to the representation of …

Informed Consent In The Post-Modern Era, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of informed consent' is intended to get physicians to talk to their patients so that patients can make reasonably knowledgeable choices about whether to undergo particular forms of medical care. Although the law has long prohibited treatment without the patient's consent,² physicians have resisted the idea that treatment decisions ultimately are for the patient to make. Only recently have physicians been willing to disclose information about the benefits and risks of recommended therapies. ³ Even with the best of intentions, however, the discussions that do take place are often far from the law's ideal of reasonable disclosure …

The Duties Of Lawyers To One Another, Roger J. Miner '56

Lawyers and the Legal Profession

No abstract provided.

Learning The Law Of Lawyering, Ronald D. Rotunda

Law Faculty News Articles, Editorials, and Blogs

No abstract provided.

The Lawyer’S Duty To Report Another Lawyer’S Unethical Violations In The Wake Of Himmel, Ronald D. Rotunda

Law Faculty Articles and Research

No abstract provided.

Art And Law: At Home And Abroad, Douglass Boshkoff

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Former Client's Disqualification Gambit: A Bad Move In Pursuit Of An Ethical Anomaly, Steven H. Goldberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article contends that the successive conflict and imputed disqualification rules in combination are both bad law and bad ethics and that a different approach would be better for clients, for the adversary system, and for the profession. Part I of the Article analyzes the development of the successive conflict and the imputed disqualification doctrines. It demonstrates that two different, not always consistent, theories caused the successive conflict disqualification principles to develop erratically, resulting in a set of rules incompatible with either supporting rationale. Part II explains why the incorporation of that set of rules into the Model Rules of …

Screening The Disqualified Lawyer: The Wrong Solution To The Wrong Problem, Thomas D. Morgan

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Made In The U.S.A.: Legal And Ethical Issues In Artificial Heart Experimentation, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The death of William Schroeder in Louisville, Kentucky, on August 6, 1986, brought to a close a remarkable chapter in public human experimentation. Artificial heart implants represent the most public experiments in the history of the world. The manner in which they are conducted is a matter of utmost public and professional concern, since it graphically portrays the seriousness with which we take our laws and ethical rules regarding the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects. Unfortunately, the brief history of artificial heart implants is neither a happy nor a proud one. Begun with high hopes and …