Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Mandatory Pro Bono: The Path To Equal Justice, John R. Desteiguer

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Response To "One Year After Dondi: Time To Get Back To Litigating?", Thomas M. Reavley

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Year After Dondi: Time To Get Back To Litigating?, William A. Brewer Iii, Francis B. Majorie

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sanctions - Stepchild Or Natural Heir To Trial And Appellate Court Delay Reduction?, Fred Woods

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rambo Litigators: Pitting Aggressive Tactics Against Legal Ethics, Thomas M. Reavley

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Ronald F. Phillips

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Canines (And Cats!) In Correctional Institutions: Legal And Ethical Issues Relating To Companion Animal Programs, Rebecca Huss

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Professional, Winter 2013, Henry Latimer Center For Professionalism

The Professional Newsletter

The Professional is a publication of The Florida Bar Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism. It is published triannually and provides practical information regarding professionalism relevant to the practice of law in Florida.

Just Because You Can Doesn’T Mean You Should: Reconciling Attorney Conduct In The Context Of Defamation With The New Professionalism, Heather M. Kolinsky

Scholarly Articles

The Florida Bar has recently proposed enforceable professionalism standards. While many states have professionalism codes they remain aspirational and unenforceable. Florida’s move toward enforceable professionalism standards is laudable, but raises concerns about how moving a “step above” the floor of the rules of professional conduct will affect advocacy and practice.

This paper examines how a shift to enforceable professionalism standards may impact absolute immunity. The paper suggests that as other states consider similar standards or simply how to better policy professionalism, perhaps it is time to also consider how discipline is imposed with respect to defamatory statements that are otherwise …

Client Science: Advice For Lawyers On Initial Client Interviews, Marjorie Corman Aaron

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

My intent is to offer an informed, wise, practical, and concise guide for initial lawyer-client meetings – meetings that are mostly an interview process for the client and the lawyer. It is written for the Client Science Course website to supplement my book, Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients Through Bad News and Other Legal Realities (Oxford University Press, 2012), referred to here as Client Science. That book was intentionally focused on particular challenges of client counseling

Local Government Ethics Programs: A Resource For Ethics Commission Members, Local Officials, Attorneys, Journalists, And Students, And A Manual For Ethics Reform, Robert Wechsler, City Ethics Inc.

AALL Legal Website of the Month

As stated on its website, this book is intended as an introduction to local government ethics for those who want to have a grasp on the various issues involved in government ethics; as a resource for those faced with a specific situation, who want to understand the legal and ethical issues involved, as well as the alternative ways of dealing with the situation; as a guidebook for those involved in government ethics reform; and as a text for students of public administration as well as supplementary reading for local public administrators.

Ovaries, Testicles, And Uteruses, Oh My! Regulating Reproductive Tissue Transplants, Valarie K. Blake

Scholarly Works

This article will explore key regulatory and ethical challenges presented by reproductive tissue transplants (RTTs) as they are currently developing, recognizing that additional issues may reveal themselves as the technologies progress. Part I of this article will begin with a discussion of the current status of the technology, including the results and status of animal and human experiments for all three types of transplants. Part II will explore the demand for RTTs — who might consider such a transplant and why RTTS might be considered by some patients as more favorable than other reproductive options. Part III will explore the …

The Right To Plea Bargain With Competent Counsel After Cooper And Frye: Is The Supreme Court Making The Ordinary Criminal Process "Too Long, Too Expensive, And Unpredictable . . . In Pursuit Of Perfect Justice"?, Bruce A. Green

Duquesne Law Review

"[T]oo long, too expensive, and unpredictable." That is how Justice Scalia described "the ordinary criminal process" in a dissenting opinion joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas. Justice Scalia blamed the length, cost, and unpredictability of criminal proceedings not on the intrinsic nature of adjudication but on the constitutional jurisprudence underlying the criminal process, which he depicted as unnecessarily intricate and unduly burdensome. One might infer, given their understanding, that these Justices will not only interpret constitutional provisions narrowly in criminal cases but, given the chance, will trim back constitutional protections that they believe earlier decisions benightedly …

Ethical Lawyering In A Global Community, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy

The pressures and opportunities of globalization have dramatically changed the nature of legal practice. How and why we practice law? For whom and whose benefit? In what contexts? And on what terms? The answers to these questions are continuously changing as a result of current global trends. The communities served by lawyers, the practice contexts in which they work and the issues that they face are increasingly diverse, complex, transnational and global in character. All of these challenges demand new competencies and raise a host of new issues about ethics and professionalism. As a threshold matter, more and more lawyers …

The Professional, Fall 2013, Henry Latimer Center For Professionalism

The Professional Newsletter

The Professional is a publication of The Florida Bar Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism. It is published triannually and provides practical information regarding professionalism relevant to the practice of law in Florida.

The Professional, Spring 2013, Henry Latimer Center For Professionalism

The Professional Newsletter

The Professional is a publication of The Florida Bar Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism. It is published triannually and provides practical information regarding professionalism relevant to the practice of law in Florida.

Attorney Responsibility And Client Incapacity, Raymond C. O'Brien

Scholarly Articles

This Article suggests what an attorney should consider when representing a client suspected by the attorney of having diminished capacity, anticipating diminished capacity, or a client anticipating a response to the legal dilemmas posed by aging. So too, this Article suggests what an attorney should consider when retained by the family members of an allegedly incapacitate person. After providing demographics regarding aging, this Article will specifically address the attorney-client relationship in the context of the Model Rules of the American Bar Association. Next, this Article will integrate the attorney's responsibility regarding the proper execution of a Last Will and Testament, …

Law School Marketing And Legal Ethics, Ben L. Trachtenberg

Faculty Publications

Law schools have misled prospective students for years about the value of legal education. In some cases, law school officials have engaged in outright deceit, knowingly spreading false information about their schools. More commonly, they have presented statistics — especially those concerning the employment outcomes of law graduates — in ways nearly guaranteed to confuse readers. These deceptions and sharp practices violate the norms of the legal profession, a profession that scrupulously regulates the advertising of legal services. The deceptions also violate ethical rules prohibiting lawyers from engaging in dishonesty, misrepresentation, and deceit. This article exposes how pitches aimed at …

Why Cant We Be Friends Preserving Public Confidence In The Judiciary Through Limited Use Of Social Networking, Helia Garrido Hull

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Good, The Right, And The Lawyer, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Comparative Research in Law & Political Economy

This essay considers whether there is a role for moral pluralism — or morality at all — in legal ethics thinking. In so doing, it has essentially two main goals. First, to contextualise the discussion, it very briefly looks at the leading conceptions of the lawyering role that have unsuccessfully grappled with the issue of morality and lawyering to-date. Second, and primarily, it looks at a new attempt to address these issues that is provided by Bradley Wendel in his recent book Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. This essay claims that while providing an elegant and admirable argument, Wendel’s book …

Legal Malpractice In A Changing Profession: The Role Of Contract Principles, Vincent R. Johnson

Cleveland State Law Review

In little more than four decades, the field of American legal ethics has been transformed from an unimportant backwater into a mighty river of legal principles that drives the practice of law in countless respects. Today, this complex matrix of substantive provisions and enforcement mechanisms ensures, to a great extent, that clients are protected from unnecessary harm, that lawyers are safeguarded from improper accusations, and that the provision of legal services is consistent with the public interest. However, the fabric of legal ethics is threatened by a looming transformation of the legal profession. That potential restructuring may revolutionize the delivery …

Achieving Climate Protection: Fostering An Essential Focus On Human Rights And Human Impacts, Ross C. Anderson, Patrick A. Thronson

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Subverting Brady V. Maryland And Denying A Fair Trial: Studying The Schuelke Report, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Schuelke Report about the ill-fated federal prosecution of the late-Senator Ted Stevens is an extraordinary contribution to criminal procedure. No other official documentation or investigative study of a criminal prosecution to my knowledge has dissected and analyzed as carefully and thoroughly the sordid and clandestine actions of a team of prosecutors who zealously wanted to win a criminal conviction at all costs. In examining this Report, one gets the feeling that as the investigation and prosecution of Senator Stevens unfolded, and the prosecution’s theory of guilt unraveled, the prosecutors became indifferent whether the defendant was really guilty; they just …

Lawyers In The Shadows: The Transactional Lawyer In A World Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how the role of transactional lawyers should change in the new world of shadow banking. Although transactional lawyers should consider the potential systemic consequences of their client's actions, their actions should be tempered by their primary duties to the client and by their responsibilities to the l,egal system more broadly.

Internal Compliance Officers In Jeopardy?, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Crucial But (Potentially) Precarious Position Of The Chief Compliance Officer, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, written for a symposium on compliance issues in financial-services firms, focuses on the role of the chief compliance officer (“CCO”). Contrasting the position with that held by a firm’s general counsel or Chief Legal Officer (CLO), the article argues that a CCO’s position holds distinct challenges. Additionally, although internal compliance systems and personnel may be characterized as functional substitutes for external regulation, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of internal compliance requires a willingness to look deep within firms. The article argues that the law and regulation may enhance firms’ incentives to invest in effective internal compliance but may …

Lawyer Conflicts Of Interest And Sophisticated Clients, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Utah OnLaw: The Utah Law Review Online Supplement

I like many things about Professor Milan Markovic’s article on which I have been invited to comment. He has chosen an interesting, important, and timely topic and provides a detailed and persuasive critique of the ability of sophisticated clients to understand and protect themselves from the dangers presented by attorney conflicts of interest. I found particularly interesting his examination of the psychological issues that surround a lawyer obtaining a client’s consent to a conflict of interest.

I devote this commentary, though, to two aspects of Professor Markovic’s article I find puzzling. The first is the modesty of the remedial measures …

Catholic Moral Teaching And Natural Law: Changing The Way We Think About And Teach Professional Legal Ethics, Peter P. Meringolo

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

Lawyers have had a hand in virtually every financial scandal in recent news. These lawyers are hired to advise clients about how to structure hedge funds, financial products, and financial transactions. Because global economies are becoming more interconnected, when large and risky financial transactions fail, they shake the stability of markets around the world.

The “hired gun” mentality is prevalent throughout the legal profession. In this mindset, lawyers believe that because they are engaged by a client, they must do their client’s bidding, and must be singularly focused on their client’s sole interests. Can we do anything to encourage lawyers …

Minding The Court: Enhancing The Decision-Making Process, Pamela Casey, Kevin Burke, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

A compelling and growing body of research from the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience provides important insights about how we process information and make decisions. This research has great potential significance for judges, who spend much of their time making decisions of great importance to others. For most judges, this research literature is not part of their judicial education. This article reviews cutting edge research about decision making and discusses its implications for helping judges and those who work with them produce fair processes and just outcomes. It builds on a 2007 American Judges Association paper that encouraged judges …

Deconstructing Antisocial Personality Disorder And Psychopathy: Guidelines-Based Approach To Prejudicial Psychiatric Labels, Kathleen Wayland, Sean O'Brien

Faculty Works

Prejudicial psychiatric labels such as antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy have an inherently prejudicial effect on courts and juries, particularly in cases involving the death penalty. This article explains how and why these labels are inherently aggravating, and also discusses the mental health literature indicating that they are subjective, unreliable and non-scientific. The authors conclude that no competent defense lawyer would pursue a mitigation case based on such a damaging and scientifically questionable psychiatric label. Further, a proper life history investigation conducted in accordance with the ABA Guidelines on the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases …