Legal Profession Commons^™

That The Laws Be Faithfully Executed: The Perils Of The Government Legal Advisor, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Suppose you practice business law. Your client comes to you and says "We have a major deal in the works. It is aggressive and cutting edge, and we need an opinion from you saying that it is legal." Obviously, you cannot promise that. First, you need to know what the deal is. So, you examine the documents and carefully analyze the law. Unfortunately, you have only bad news to report: the deal is illegal, and there is no way to fix it. But with a little creative stretching of the law and some body English you could make a case …

The Master Mason: How Professor Baldus Built A Bridge From Learning To Law And The Legacy Of Equal Justice He Leaves Behind, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These are Chief Judge Baker’s remarks eulogizing the late Professor David Baldus. Chief Judge Baker observes that Professor Baldus was an extraordinary educator-lawyer who mastered the fields of social science and statistics. He adds that Professor Baldus was diligent in his research and strived to make the law accessible. Chief Judge Baker discusses how Professor Baldus’s research on the death penalty and proportionality review successfully bridged the law and learning, without ever losing sight of compassion.

What We Are Learning, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Why Lawyers Should Assess Lawyer's Ethics: A Review Of Adrian Evans, Assessing Lawyers' Ethics: A Practitioner's Guide, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

There has been a growing interest in empirical research on law firms and lawyer conduct for more than a decade. Recent studies have reached the same conclusion as studies from the 1960s and 1970s – the ethical culture in the law office is critical to the ethical behavior of the individual lawyers in the office.

With this in mind, the question becomes this: What should the legal profession do to encourage better law firm management to promote ethical behavior? In ASSESSING LAWYERS' ETHICS, Adrian Evans maintains that law societies and bar associations could improve lawyers' ethical behavior through various strategies …

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …

The Silent But Gifted Law Student: Transforming Anxious Public Speakers Into Well-Rounded Advocates, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

The premise of this Article is that a certain cluster of students in every law school experiences severe public speaking anxiety (as contrasted with standard low-grade nerves) — whether because of childhood upbringing, adolescent or college experiences, or new environmental triggers — and needs support to gain control of this fear instead of repressing it as a perceived weakness. This Article proposes that, with the right level of awareness and a thoughtful psychological approach, law schools can, and should, develop programs to assist students in overcoming this stumbling block. To do so, law professors first must understand that it is …

Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Hiring, Promotion, And Retention , Bryan L. Adamson, Calvin Pang, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine Kruse, Robert Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, David Santacroce

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Unbound By Law: Keith Aoki As Our Avatar, Steven W. Bender, Ibrahim J. Gassama

Faculty Articles

Introducing the memorial symposium in the Oregon Law Review for the late Professor Keith Aoki, who taught at Oregon from 1993 to 2006, we frame the contributions of invited scholars who address Keith’s impact on the law and legal academy through his prolific work on diverse areas of law — intellectual property, local government, critical geography, Asian American jurisprudence, immigration and critical Latina/o jurisprudence. Collectively, the pieces evidence a scholar armed with an unwavering commitment to critical analysis and social justice, while wielding a vast array of cultural and intellectual influences from his career as an artist. Given Keith’s legacy …

Recent Writing On Law And Happiness, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

In the course of a review of recent books on the hedonic level of lawyers' lives, Professor Richard Delgado puts forward an explanation for the high rate of stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout among lawyers. Professor Delgado examines suggestions of leading authorities on how attorneys may achieve happiness, usually through extrinsic measures such as more vacations, exercise, or meditation. He also considers proposals on how supervisors can make legal workers more content, including more art work for the walls, windows with leafy outlooks, a basketball court, or more praise. Professor Delgado specifically criticizes the teachings of positive psychology, explaining that …

Painting Beyond The Numbers: The Art Of Providing Access In Law School Admissions To Ensure Full Representation In The Profession, Paula Lustbader

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Un-Apologizing For Context And Experience In Legal Education, John Mckay

Faculty Articles

This Essay accompanies the Fifth Annual Symposium at Creighton University School of Law addressing the rapidly changing legal profession and our not-so-rapidly changing legal education and law school pedagogy. The Symposium's focus on the changing practice of law provides an opportunity to reconsider the woefully incomplete effort by law schools to respond to the challenge of the Carnegie Report and its many preceding critics. Rather than merely pile on, however, this Essay suggests that Jesuit law schools in particular might have something to offer their colleagues-an experiential teaching style grounded in centuries old pedagogy inspired by the founder of the …

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

There is now a literature on how to become a law professor. The first book-length treatment of the subject, Becoming A Law Professor, displays a common fault of this literature in directing candidates’ focus on process at the expense of substance. The present body of material on the market for new legal academics does not persuade candidates of the necessity of locating their agendas and voices as scholars, much less does it show them how to go about that vital search. It also risks contributing to a tendency of credentialing processes to standardize resumes without improving outcomes. A second-generation literature …

Access To Justice And The Ethics And Politics Of Alternative Business Structures, Richard Devlin, Ora Morison

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite ongoing concern about access to justice in Canada, the problem persists. Meanwhile, the basic model for legal practice in Canada is the same as when the profession first emerged centuries ago in England. Only lawyers can own and control legal practices. This is not the case in other common law jurisdictions where rules have evolved to allow nonlawyers to own the companies that provide legal services. Based on a comparative analysis of the development of these alternative business structures (ABSs) in Australia and the United Kingdom, and the nondevelopment of ABSs in the United States, the authors argue that …

The Case For Value Billing In Chapter 11, Nancy B. Rapoport

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Thinking Like A Lawyer Abroad: Putting Justice Into Legal Reasoning, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

Americans are taking new interest in legal reasoning. Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning by Professor Frederick Schauer suggests why. According to Schauer, American legal methods often require decision-makers “to do something other than the right thing.” There has got to be a better way.

Now comes a book that offers Americans opportunities to look into a world where legal methods help decision-makers do the right thing. According to Reinhard Zippelius in his newly published Introduction to German Legal Methods, German legal methods help decision makers resolve legal problems “in a just and equitable manner.”

This …

A Jurisprudence Of Insurgency: Lawyers As Companions Of Unimagined Change, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Loyalty And Social Change, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

Fundamentally, cause lawyers engage in their work to make social change. Scholars of cause lawyering have generated a robust and rich literature considering important issues, such as what kinds of advocacy strategies best generate social change and what features of the relationship between cause client and cause lawyer are critical to an engaged and mutual relationship. But, the literature has neglected a key aspect of the cause lawyer and client relationship: whether the particular kind of loyalty that exists as between them hinders or helps in achieving social change. This Article fills that void. It first illuminates the particular features …

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

Publications

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …

The Flight From Judgment: Reflections On Benjamin Barton’S An Empirical Study Of Supreme Court Justice Pre-Appointment Experience, Jennifer Hendricks

Publications

Discusses J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro as an example of the Supreme Court's failure to rely on practical wisdom, in connection with the historic shift toward increasingly elite credentials for the justices.

The Aba, The Aall, The Aals, And The “Duplication Of Legal Publications”, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1935 and 1940, the American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, and the American Association of Law Libraries joined forces to work on solutions to a problem often referred to as the “duplication of legal publications.” The need for practicing attorneys and law libraries to purchase multiple and duplicative versions of published law reports and other law books was burdensome in costs, complicated the research process, and contributed to what the American Law Institute identified as the two chief defects of American law: “its uncertainty and its complexity.” This article highlights the efforts of the ABA, the …

Contingent Compensation Of Post-Conviction Counsel: A Modest Proposal To Identify Meritorious Claims And Reduce Wasteful Government Spending, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to a symposium on post-conviction litigation argues that the lack of properly-incentivized counsel is a primary problem with our failing system of habeas litigation. The lack of counsel causes a great flood of frivolous petitions by pro se prisoners, while also preventing prisoners with meritorious claims from getting relief. The lack of counsel, and more fundamentally, the lack of funding therefor, thus perpetuates the problem of incarceration waste. Government-funded contingent compensation of post-conviction counsel may be the most promising way to help courts identify the bona fide cases deserving of relief, providing more accurate justice and saving money …