Legal Profession Commons^™

Am I My Partner's Keeper? Peer Review In Law Firms, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the concept of peer review in the practice of law. The article begins with an introduction to law partners’ liability exposure for the acts or omissions of their law partners. The article explains how this exposure has traditionally been approached as vicarious liability and how the government is attempting to transform these issues into direct liability by using failure to monitor claims. Part I briefly reviews perspectives on the emergence, growth, and structure of law firms, then uses a matrix to show how firm culture and organizational structure affect internal and external controls on attorney conduct. Part …

Review Of "Constitutional Torts" By Sheldon H. Nahmod, Michael L. Wells, Thomas A. Eaton, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

The most interesting issues in the field of constitutional torts, involving the legal and moral bases for the government's responsibility for injuries it causes, are the most difficult ones for lawyers to explore. The question whether, as a moral or social policy matter, governments and government officials should enjoy immunities or other defenses not available to private individuals is rarely confronted directly in judicial opinions or in scholarship on constitutional torts, yet it lurks behind many of the doctrinal issues that come up in constitutional tort litigation.¹ A slight scratch on the surface of doctrines as disparate as official …

Commentary: Policy Implications, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Preliminary Inquiry Into The Transcendence Of Value Creation, Frederick Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

To Save A Life: Why A Rabbi And A Jewish Lawyer Must Disclose A Client Confidence Symposium: Executing The Wrong Person: The Professionals' Ethical Dilemmas, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

As adopted by courts and legislatures, lawyer's ethical codes have the force of law. They require a lawyer to keep information confidential unless the lawyer knows the client will commit a future crime. Jewish tradition generally forbids the disclosure of confidential information as "a terrible invasion of another person's privacy."This interdiction, rooted in the Torah's prohibition on talebearing, applies even when the information disclosed is true. The great medieval commentator, Maimonides, observed that gossip "ruins the world.” He further reproached "the evil tongue of the slander-monger who speaks disparagingly of one's fellow, even if the truth is told." Accordingly, the …

Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve The Conduct And Reputation Of The Bar, The, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

The Article explains how the Professionalism Paradigm distinguishes between self-interested businesspersons and altruistic professionals who place the public good above their own interests and those of their clients. The legal profession has used this Business-Profession dichotomy to obtain control of the delivery legal services, including a legislative monopoly on the practice of law. Today, the Professionalism Paradigm faces a crisis as leading lawyers, judges, and scholars complain that law has become a business and is no longer a profession. The Article “identifies this shift as a time for hope rather than as a cause for despair. Applying Thomas S. Kuhn's …

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …

Rediscovering Client Decisionmaking: The Impact Of Role-Playing, Mary Zulack

Faculty Scholarship

There are more things of importance to representing clients than are disclosed through a typical interview or counseling session, even a session undertaken by a lawyer earnestly attempting to hear rather than ignore the client. We lawyers are often vividly aware, when we pause to contemplate the point, that we do not know all we should about our clients. We may also believe that we have great gulfs of knowledge and experience to cross in order to hear and understand any particular client. Further, we fear that our ability to cross these gulfs is limited by the human, and lawyerly, …

Business Lawyers And Value Creation For Clients, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium marks an important milestone in legal scholarship and education: The spotlight falls on business lawyers for a change. Ten years ago, when one of us first wrote about what business lawyers really do, no one had devoted much attention to this part of the profession. In his broadside against lawyers, Derek Bok, then President of Harvard University and formerly dean of its law school, reserved his invective for litigators and the litigation process. Business lawyers captured the attention of very few critics; even on the unusual occasion when we were noticed, the criticism was at least funny. If …

A Hawk In The Land Of Vultures, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

What To Do When Your Case Is Front Page News: Panel Discussion, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defending, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Social Justice, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Criminal Defense Lawyer's Reliance On Bias And Prejudice, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is divided into three parts. Part I examines both the many contexts in which criminal defense lawyers and clinical students encounter bias and prejudice,¹² and the commonly-raised objections to its exploitation. Part II looks at the way the tactical use of bias relates to a lawyer's duty of zealous advocacy. Here, the Article focuses on whether existing ethics rules provide guidance for a lawyer's use of bias and whether proposed rules aimed at eliminating such advocacy would improve or diminish justice. This article argues against such efforts because they impinge on legitimate lawyering, and they may distract …

What Happens When Mediation Is Institutionalized?: To The Parties, Practitioners, And Host Institutions, James J. Alfini, John Barkai, Robert Baruch Bush, Michele Hermann, Jonathan Hyman, Kimberlee Kovach, Carol B. Liebman, Sharon Press, Leonard Riskin

Faculty Scholarship

The Alternative Dispute Resolution Section of the Association of American Law Schools presented a program, at the 1994 AALS Conference, on the institutionalization of mediation – through courtconnected programs and otherwise. The topic is an important one, because this phenomenon has become increasingly common in recent years. Moreover, the topic seemed especially appropriate for the 1994 program, since Florida – the host state for the conference – was one of the first states to adopt a comprehensive statute providing for court-ordered mediation (at the trial judge's option) in civil disputes of all kinds. The move toward institutionalizing mediation has raised …

Disputing Through Agents: Cooperation And Conflict Between Lawyers In Litigation, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Do lawyers facilitate dispute resolution or do they instead exacerbate conflict and pose a barrier to the efficient resolution of disputes? A distinctive characteristic of our formal mechanisms of conflict resolution is that clients carry on their disputes through lawyers. Yet, at a time when the role of lawyers in dispute resolution has captured not only public but political attention, social scientists have remained largely uninterested in the influence of lawyers on the disputing process. This is not to say that academics have ignored the growth in civil litigation in the United States. Economists have developed an extensive literature that …

Pretrial Case Management Under The Amended Rules: Too Many Words For A Good Idea, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Lawyer's Duty Of Public Service: More Than Charity?, Tigran W. Eldred, Thomas Schoenherr

Faculty Scholarship

The question of whether lawyers have an ethical duty to perform public service-and, in particular, whether the obligation requires that a percentage of time be devoted to providing free legal services to the poor'-has a disjointed and uneven history. Leaders of the bar, espousing various and often conflicting views of morality, compassion, noblesse oblige, and individual autonomy, have contributed to this state of affairs, creating a complicated web of vague ideals that today jeopardizes the legal profession's sense of its own public obligations. On the one hand, the legal profession remains dedicated to the traditional view that public service …

Editing, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In May 1993, I published a book review of Richard Posner's Sex and Reason. The review was modest in length and in purpose, part of an informal division of labor undertaken by the many critics of Sex and Reason. It challenged Judge Posner's claim that an economic analysis of sex was something new and argued that women have been making rational choices with regard to sex and reproduction for quite a long time, something that Judge Posner's book seemed to miss and misunderstand throughout.

Readers of the review (the members of my MCI Friends and Family Plan) have …

A Trustworthy Lawyer, Winnie F. Taylor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Law Between The Bar And The State, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional understanding of the relation between law and professional legal ethics is that legal ethics covers matters not covered by law; that ethics sits passively above law, starting where law leaves off. In this Article, Professor Susan Koniak argues that this understanding is wrong. She asserts that professional ethics are in competition and conflict with law as it is embodied in the pronouncements of courts and legislatures. Although "law" is usually considered to be the near exclusive preserve of the state, the Article contends that private groups also have "law," but it is usually called "ethics." The legal profession's …

Attorneys' Malpractice Policies: Regulatory Exclusions And Public Policy, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

The courts have yet to decide the issue of the enforceability of provisions in legal malpractice insurance policies that specifically exclude from coverage claims made by government regulators such as the FDIC. The question has reached the courts with respect to such exclusionary provisions in directors' and officers' liability insurance policies, and here the courts are split. The author discusses the current case law and the statutory developments.

Jewish Lawyering In A Multicultural Society: A Midrash On Levinson Colloquy, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

When we acknowledge the contradiction between the project's goal and the reality of group influence, we are led to consider the alternative strategy of creating community. Such a strategy would invite lawyers to begin a community dialogue regarding how each of our group identities, and the responses of others to our identities, interfere with our efforts to realize the goal of equal justice. While significant to the understanding of group dynamics, consideration of Jewish lawyering probably has limited value as a predictor of an individual lawyer's professional conduct. The actual and potential influence of Jewishness on lawyering is quite diverse, …

Rediscovering The Republican Origins Of The Legal Ethics Codes, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Many commentators wrongly assume that the hired gun ideal is the foundation of our legal ethics codes. This article explains that this assumption is based on an historical mistake that has consequences for interpreting the modern codes. Judge George Sharswood, the nineteenth century scholar whose work provided the basis for the 1908 A.B.A. Canons of Ethics, had a republican conception that rejected the adversarial ethic in favor of a more nuanced conception that combined loyalty to clients with a thick obligation to the public good that both bounded client representation and required lawyers to provide political leadership. Although the emphasis …

Finding A Suitable Lawyer: Why Consumers Can't Always Get What They Want And What The Legal Profession Should Do About It, Linda H. Morton

Faculty Scholarship

This article criticizes the inadequacy of information available to consumers seeking an attorney compatible with their needs. The article describes why such inadequacy exists – in part because the legal profession distribute information to consumers through the narrow lens of attorney self-regulation rather than through the broader lens of consumer need. Yet, in striving to maintain their autonomy, lawyers have only perpetuated the enormous gap between information the public would like to have and that which they actually receive. The article explores sources of information consumers have access to, why such sources are so limited, and finally, how the problem …

The Judicial Prerogative, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In John Locke's account of separation of powers, the executive is not limited to enforcing the rules laid down by the legislature. The chief magistrate also exercises the prerogative, a power "to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law and sometimes even against it. "Locke explained that such a discretionary power is required because "it is impossible to foresee and so by laws to provide for all accidents and necessities that may concern the public, or make such laws as will do no harm, if they are executed with an inflexible rigor on …

The Third Man, Philip C. Bobbitt

Faculty Scholarship

Sandy is a divided man. On the one hand he is captivated by the notion of the theoretical and the explanatory, an idea that has captivated all of us since the 17th century. For Descartes, for Newton, for Freud, for Marx, for Levinson: theory is the foundation for understanding, and understanding for practice. How do they calculate the attraction among the planets? They apply the inverse square law according to the theories of Newton. How does Freud cure his patients: he explains to them why they've been behaving so peculiarly; he does this by expositing his theory. How does Marx …

The Supreme Court, 1991 Term - Leading Cases, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Towards Parity In Bar Passage Rates And Law School Performance: Exploring The Sources Of Disparities Between Racial And Ethnic Groups, Katherine L. Vaughns

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Whole Truth?: How Rules Of Evidence Make Lawyers Deceitful, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.