Legal Profession Commons^™

Re-Vision Quest: A Law School Guide To Designing Experiential Courses Involving Real Lawyering, Deborah Maranville, Mary A. Lynch, Susan L. Kay, Phyllis Goldfarb, Russell Engler

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Service-Learning Model In The Law School Curriculum, Laurie Morin, Susan Waysdorf

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Practice-Based Learning: Emphasizing Practice And Offering Critical Perspectives On The Dangers Of “Co-Op”Tation, Brooke K. Baker

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections: The Trajectory Of The Legal Profession In A Post-9/11 World, Joseph W. Armbrust

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Of 2001: Policy And Precedent, Kenneth R. Feinberg

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Military Lawyers And The Two Cultures Problem, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Military and humanitarian lawyers approach the laws of war—labeled “law of armed conflict” by the former and “international humanitarian law” by the latter—in very different ways. For military lawyers, the starting point is military necessity, and the reigning assumption is that legal regulation of war must accommodate military necessity. For humanitarian lawyers, the starting point is human dignity and human rights. This article argues that from these radically different axioms legal consequences systematically follow regarding treaty interpretation, the sources and reach of customary international law, the nature of international law, deference and discretion to military commanders, and the connection between …

Misplaced Fidelity, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper is a review essay of W. Bradley Wendel's Lawyers and Fidelity to Law, part of a symposium on Wendel's book. Parts I and II aim to situate Wendel's book within the literature on philosophical or theoretical legal ethics. I focus on two points: Wendel's argument that legal ethics should be examined through the lens of political theory rather than moral philosophy, and his emphasis on the role law plays in setting terms of social coexistence in the midst of moral pluralism. Both of these themes lead him to reject viewing legal ethics as an instance of "the …

Changing The Narrative Of Child Welfare, Matthew I. Fraidin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In child welfare, the difference we can make as lawyers for parents, children, and the state, and as judges, is to prevent children from entering foster care unnecessarily. And we can end a child’s stay in foster care as quickly as possible. To do that, we have to fight against a powerful narrative of child welfare and against the accepted “top-down” paradigm of legal services.

In this essay, Professor Fraidin suggests that we can achieve our goals of limiting entries to foster care and speeding exits from it by looking for the strengths of the people involved in our cases, …

Money And Meaning: The Moral Economy Of Law Firm Compensation, Milton C. Regan, Lisa H. Rohrer

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article, part of an ongoing qualitative research project on law firm culture, analyzes the role of compensation in the modern law firm. At first blush, the significance of the compensation process may seem obvious: it represents an economy in which the firm distributes material rewards to its partners. From this perspective, disputes and dissatisfaction regarding compensation are simply attempts by partners to improve their financial well-being.

Our research suggests, however, that compensation serves to distribute not just money, but also respect. Compensation thus represents the operation of both a material and a moral economy within a firm. As a …

Ode To Judge Leon D. Lazer, Martin A. Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

States Side Story: Career Paths Of International Ll.M. Students, Or "I Like To Be In America", Carole Silver

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article draws on an empirical study of the careers of international law graduates who earned an LL.M. in the United States, and considers the role of a U.S. LL.M. as a path for building a legal career in the United States. It identifies the institutional, political, and economic forces that present challenges to graduates who attempt to stay in the United States. While U.S. law schools prize the international diversity of their graduate students, this study reveals that the U.S. legal profession is most accessible to international students from English-speaking common law countries, whose language and background allow them …

The Pedigree Problem: Are Law School Ties Choking The Profession?, William D. Henderson, Rachel M. Zahorsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Child Representation In America: Progress Report From The National Quality Improvement Center, Donald N. Duquette, Julian Darwall

Articles

Few dispute that children in the child welfare system need effective representation. In October 2009, the U.S. Children's Bureau named the University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). The QIC-ChildRep is a five-year, multimillion dollar project, charged with gathering, developing, and communicating knowledge on child representation. In addition, the QIC-ChildRep is tasked with promoting a consensus on the role of the child's legal representative and providing one of the first random assignment experimental design research projects on the legal representation of children.

The Paradox And Promise Of Restorative Attorney Discipline, Jennifer Gerarda Brown, Liana G.T. Wolf

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Restorative Lawyer Discipline In Australia, Linda Haller

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Paradox Lost: The Potential Of Restorative Attorney Discipline — With A Cautionary Call For Making Distinctions, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Promise Of Client-Centered Professional Norms, Katherine R. Kruse

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Child Welfare Cases Involving Mental Illness: Reflections On The Role And Responsibilities Of The Lawyer-Guardian Ad Litem, Frank E. Vandervort

Articles

Child welfare cases involving mental illness suffered either by a child or his parent can be among the most difficult and perplexing that a child’s lawyerguardian ad litem (L-GAL) will handle. They may present daunting problems of accessing necessary and appropriate services as well as questions about whether and when such mental health problems can be resolved or how best to manage them. They also require the L-GAL to carefully consider crucially important questions—rarely with all the information one would like to have and too often with information that comes late in the case, is fragmented or glaringly incomplete. This …

Where Is The "Quality Movement" In Law Practice?, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The "Quality Movement" that originated in industrial production and has since influenced the professions prescribes standardized work, root cause analysis of errors, peer review, and performance measurement. While these reforms have transformed medicine and some other professions, their influence has lagged in the legal profession. This Essay reviews the limited progress of the reforms in law and assesses the cultural, institutional, and doctrinal obstacles they face.

There Is No Summer In The Courtroom, Maureen A. Howard

Articles

Pacific Northwesterners frequently lament summer’s delayed arrival to our verdant corner of the country, and this year is no exception. June was unseasonably cool and wet, and the first official weekend of summer brought grey skies, chilly breezes, and sheets of rain. It is no surprise, then, that each year, as August approaches and summer seems to have truly arrived, locals eagerly search their closets for rarely-used warm-weather attire. Lawyers are not immune from the lure to celebrate summer’s overdue arrival by breaking out tank tops, flip-flops, sunglasses, and shorts. Nonetheless, a trial lawyer needs to remember that although summer …

A History Of Professionalism: Julius Henry Cohen And The Professions As A Route To Citizenship, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

This paper revives the notion that professionalism and the legal profession can serve as a mechanism for immigrants and those who are not born into wealth or privilege to achieve status. I draw on the example of Cohen, a Jewish lawyer who achieved a great deal of success within the profession in the early 20th Century, to argue that the rhetoric surrounding the professions allows immigrants and others to use professional success to find their way to full inclusion and citizenship. While acknowledging the merits of the critiques of the professions as rent-seeking cartels, I argue that professionalism is an …

The Flood Of U.S. Lawyers: Natural Fluctuation Or Professional Climate Change?, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

This paper considers how US courts, which regulate the US legal profession, should respond to the perceived excess of lawyers (i.e. to the lack of adequate employment opportunities for lawyers). It begins by summarizing the courts’ regulatory role. It then situates the contemporary flood-of-lawyers problem in the unavailability of well-paid legal work, not in the absence of a need for lawyers’ services: many people need lawyers, but they cannot afford them. Next, the paper explores whether the problem is simply a product of natural economic fluctuation which will be solved naturally, particularly if potential law school applicants become better informed, …

Conflicts As Inner Trials: Transitions For Clients, Ideas For Lawyers, Jonathan R. Cohen

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

As times of transition, conflicts often produce significant inner trials for parties. This paper categorizes some of the more common inner trials parties in conflict face (e.g., coping with loss, strong emotions, uncertainty, etc.) and suggests that, as liminal times in people's lives, some conflicts may also hold within them important opportunities for learning, growth and self-definition. This paper also offers some ideas for how lawyers might best assist clients during such transitions.

Do Not Go Gentle: Using Emeritus Pro Bono Attorneys To Achieve The Promise Of Justice, Kelly S. Terry

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Prosecutors And Professional Regulation, Bruce A. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Prosecutors often express mistrust of professional regulators, their rules and their processes. This may have been more understandable twenty years ago, when prosecutors perceived that the organized bar had been captured by defense lawyers seeking to use professional regulation as a means of imposing limits on criminal investigative authority that the law did not otherwise recognize. Although that criticism no longer has much basis in reality, it has persisted in the rhetoric prosecutors employ in advocacy regarding their professional conduct. This article explores prosecutors’ public attitude toward professional regulation, beginning with a brief account of their responses two decades ago, …

The Virtue Of Low Barriers To Becoming A Lawyer: Promoting Liberal And Democratic Values [With Sinna Nasseri], Russell G. Pearce, Sinna Nasseri

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new perspective on how to determine whether barriers to practicing law are appropriate. It identifies a connection between those barriers and the role of legal services providers (‘lawyers’) in permitting individuals to obtain their basic political and economic rights in a liberal democracy. Democratic values require making legal services as equally available as possible to all citizens, while liberal values dictate that each individual has access in order to enforce human rights, compete in a market economy, and engage in a legal system grounded in the rule of law. Liberal and democratic values therefore require the …

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …

Building Resilience In Foster Children: The Role Of The Child's Advocate, Frank E. Vandervort, James Henry, Mark A. Sloane

Articles

This Article provides an introduction to, and brief overview of trauma, its impact upon foster children, and steps children's advocates" can take to lessen or ameliorate the impact of trauma upon their clients. This Article begins in Part 11 by defining relevant terms. Part III addresses the prevalence of trauma among children entering the child welfare system. Part IV considers the neurodevelopmental (i.e., the developing brain) impact of trauma on children and will explore how that trauma may manifest emotionally and behaviorally. With this foundation in place, Part V discusses the need for a comprehensive trauma assessment including a thorough …

The Evolution Of The Common Law And Efficiency, Nuno Garoupa, Carlos Liguerre

Faculty Scholarship

The efficiency of the common law hypothesis has generated a large bulk of literature in the last decades. The main argument is that there is an implicit economic logic to the common law; the doctrines in common law provide a coherent and consistent system of incentives which induce efficient behavior.

We start by observing that if the common law is overall evolutionarily efficient, we are left with no explanation for the important doctrinal differences across common law jurisdictions. The observation is more striking if we keep in mind that presumably the de jure initial condition was the same, namely English …

Professional Identity As Advocacy, Robert Rubinson

All Faculty Scholarship

The legal profession adheres to a story of a unified profession. Nevertheless, the profession has distinct professional sub-groups which repeatedly represent clients with interests adverse to those represented by attorneys who identify with other sub-groups. The idea of "professional identity as advocacy" describes how such professional sub-groups accuse opposing subgroups of greed, self-aggrandizement, or worse. This is most notable in two areas: personal injury litigation and criminal cases. This process has two seemingly contradictory consequences. First, it renders narrow areas extraordinarily visible, thus defining popular discourse and conceptions about lawyers and law. Second, it masks vast areas of litigation and …