Legal Profession Commons^™

Extending Legal Privilege To In-House Counsel In India, L Viswanathan, Animesh Bisht

National Law School of India Review

Client-attorney privilege is a cornerstone of the rule of law, yet its extension to in-house counsel in India remains fraught with uncertainty. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in In re: Summoning Advocates who give legal opinion or represent parties during investigation of cases and related issues, Suo Moto Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 2 of 2025, reinforced a status-based exclusion, holding that in-house counsel fall outside the definition of “Advocate” under the Advocates Act, 1961 and the Bar Council of India Rules, and therefore cannot claim privilege under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. This paper examines the Indian statutory framework and …

Bar Prep As A Balancing Act: The Process, Pitfalls, And Payoffs Of Juggling Multiple Commercial Bar Review Resources, Tiffane Cochran, Andrea M. Pals

AccessLex Institute Research

AccessLex Institute® undertook a study to understand how Spring 2025 law graduates leveraged commercial bar review resources to prepare for the July 2025 bar exam. Across three surveys administered in April 2025, August 2025, and January 2026, we explored the graduates’ intended and actual use of commercial bar review resources, their approaches to allocating time among bar review resources, and whether those approaches resulted in bar exam success. The data yield a few key observations:

• Nearly all respondents used a commercial bar review course in combination with one to three supplemental resources, ramping up the number of hours they spent …

Not A Pretty Picture: Race, Gender, And Inequality In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Tanina Rostain

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Responding to renewed interest in law school as a path to a career “to do well and do good,” this essay examines Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe, and Michelson’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers and its account of inequality and opportunity in the American legal profession. Based on a 20-year study of more than 2,000 lawyers, the book traces how credentials, race, gender, class, and law school selectivity profoundly shape career trajectories. The essay situates those findings within the divide in private practice between corporate practice and people law and interrogates the professional ideology—rooted in the lawyer’s traditional role …

Who’S The Lawyer Now? Professional Identity In A Genai World, Aric K. Short

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping the legal profession and, more fundamentally, lawyers’ professional identities. As AI systems increasingly perform tasks traditionally associated with legal practice, the article argues that technological competence and adaptability have become essential components of professional identity formation. It contends that lawyers must move beyond viewing AI as merely a tool for efficiency and instead confront the ways in which it is transforming expectations of competence, professional responsibility, and legal expertise.

The article further explores what may remain uniquely human in legal practice as AI capabilities expand. It argues that practical wisdom, …

Betschart V. Oregon: A Seven-Day Standard For Maine, Henry Gates

Maine Law Review

Maine lacks a clear standard for ensuring the right to counsel for indigent defendants. The State’s public defense system is struggling to meet Maine’s constitutional mandate: To provide indigent defense services in rural areas and across the state. An aging bar with few new attorneys working in rural areas—where there are often higher relative prosecution rates and a corresponding increased need for legal services—is contributing to the problem. This has resulted in a legal system that negatively impacts rural communities and indigent defendants to the point that one court concluded the state is violating the Sixth Amendment. Following the Ninth …

One Year's Seeding: Looking Back On The Last Seven Years Of Maine's Progress Toward Rural Justice, Christopher Northrop, Seth Main

Maine Law Review

Nationally, the crisis in access to legal services in rural areas continues to grow despite significant attention and efforts to reverse this troubling trend. This Article explores Maine’s efforts to address our legal deserts. The Article’s starting point is a retrospective look at our 2019 national symposium on rural justice and accompanying Maine Law Review issue. We will try to measure successes and failures, while also addressing the significant impact caused by the intervening pandemic. The Article will then shift to an analysis of the current landscape, focusing on the role of the University of Maine School of Law. We …

Legal Deserts Over Time, Cory L. Dodds

Maine Law Review

Legal deserts—counties with exceptionally low attorney availability—shape housing stability, personal safety, health outcomes, and economic security in rural communities. Yet, national scholarship has not yet determined whether attorney scarcity is transient or durable and relies largely on cross-sectional snapshots and population-based headcounts benchmarked to the American Bar Association’s (ABA) threshold of one attorney per 1,000 residents. These measures can obscure temporal dynamics, overstate functional supply, and embed contested normative assumptions about adequacy. This Article offers a national, longitudinal, and definition-sensitive analysis of legal deserts using county-level data from the forty-eight contiguous states at three observation points. Attorney supply is measured …

Foreword, Adam Fortier-Brown

Maine Law Review

Access to legal services in America has emerged as one of the most pressing structural challenges facing the legal community. As attorneys increasingly concentrate in metropolitan areas, large areas are left with few practicing attorneys and challenging prospects of attracting many more. The consequences of this challenge reach across nearly every aspect of life in these communities—from housing and family stability, to starting or winding down businesses, and critically, to the constitutional guarantees that attach when someone is charged with a crime. Yet, these challenges have also generated a period of genuine creativity and collaboration between communities and different institutions. …

Nevada Legal History: Trailblazing Nevada African American Attorneys, Bryan K. Scott

External Articles & Tributes

No abstract provided.

A Lawyer’S Responsibility To The Rule Of Law, Joseph Mead

Et Cetera

The American legal system faces a growing crisis as the gap between vested rights and judicial remedies expands. Attacks on the legal profession deter lawyers from taking on lawsuits challenging the federal government, potentially expanding the gap between right and remedy. This essay describes how the legal profession has responded to this moment and urges attorneys to renew their commitment to the rule of law.

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Volume 49 Masthead

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 49 Masthead

Reimagining Legal Education: The Transformative Power Of Small-Group Instruction, Michael I. Meyerson

Seattle University Law Review

Legal education is failing its students. Those entering their first year of law school have greater anxiety and less developed reading and writing skills than ever before. The traditional large Socratic class, which was never the most effective teaching method, has become increasingly counterproductive.

This Article contends that small-group instruction provides the opportunity for superior teaching, especially for first-year law students. Recent scholarship in active learning, educational psychology, and students’ mental health demonstrates the limitations of the traditional large Socratic class experience. Building on that theoretical foundation and informed by sustained classroom experience, this Article argues that small-group pedagogy more …

Land Without Legacy: The Case For Market-Based Appraisals On Hawaiian Home Lands, Alexis C. Owens

Seattle University Law Review

The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 (HHCA) was enacted to restore Native Hawaiians to ancestral lands and promote long term economic self-sufficiency. More than a century later, that promise remains unfulfilled. This Note argues that a central but overlooked barrier lies in the HHCA’s mandated use of the replacement cost appraisal method, which systematically undervalues homestead properties by excluding market forces. In one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, this approach suppresses home equity, the primary means of intergenerational wealth building, and restricts beneficiaries’ access to credit and financial stability. By severing the connection between …

International Law’S Forgotten Refugees—Palestinian Refugees In Egypt

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines the legal and humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian refugees who have fled to Egypt amidst the ongoing violence in Gaza. While escaping active conflict, these refugees face systemic barriers to employment and education, rendering their living conditions precarious and unsustainable. The unique legal status of Palestinian refugees stems from the fact that they have been excluded from the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, leaving them without any meaningful international protection. This exclusion is rooted in the political complexities of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and reflects a fragmented legal framework that prioritizes limited humanitarian aid over …

How The Dod Discourages Military Families From Seeking Mental Health Counseling, Christina Welch

Seattle University Law Review

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) administration of the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) presents significant barriers to mental health care access for military spouses and children. This paper explores how the EFMP, though designed to support military families with special needs, inadvertently creates barriers to mental health treatment. Military family members often do not seek mental health treatment to avoid the program's mandatory enrollment requirements. Military family members often view enrollment in the program undesirable because enrollment can restrict the pool of potential future duty assignment locations that are available to service members.

The lack of comprehensive data collection by …

2025, Richard Delgado

Seattle University Law Review

"In a cutting and provocative social critique in one of the more extended Rodrigo Chronicles, Richard Delgado in 2025 employs skillful narrative—one of CRT’s many contributions to legal scholarship —to tell a gripping story of just how far the nation has descended into darkness with President Trump’s re-election. In Delgado’s vision, law professors—along with other political opponents of the President: immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, the underserved—have targets on their backs."

-excerpt from Kevin Johnson's review of 2025

The Preventative Care Gap: Completing The Aca’S Vision For Health, Abby Nagaich

Seattle University Law Review

This Note examines the preventive care mandate under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the legal, political, and practical challenges that threaten its effectiveness. While the ACA significantly expanded access to no-cost preventive services, gaps remain—particularly in behavioral health, obesity management, and equitable service delivery. Ongoing litigation, potential administrative rollbacks, and shifting political leadership further destabilize this critical component of public health policy.

This Note argues that for the ACA to fulfill its original promise—and for any health framework to succeed—preventive care must be redefined as a comprehensive, early intervention approach grounded in both systemic access and patient education. It …

Good Intentions, Mixed Messages: Considering Mental Health In Attorney Discipline, Sarah J. Schendel

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

The legal profession urges struggling lawyers to seek help—but what happens when those same lawyers become the subject of discipline? As mental health challenges among lawyers become more widely acknowledged and understood, the disciplinary systems that govern the profession remain uneven and opaque in their treatment of mental health as a mitigating factor. This Article presents the first comprehensive review of over a decade of disciplinary decisions and admonitions in Massachusetts, focusing on how mental health is considered during sanctioning and whether current standards meaningfully reflect the profession’s stated commitments to fairness, public protection, and attorney well-being.

The analysis reveals …

Veiled Justice: Secularism And The Hijab Across Democracies, Mohamed ‘Arafa

Seattle University Law Review

For much of 2022, Iran was gripped by widespread protests led by women who openly challenged the regime’s authority, particularly its compulsory veiling laws, following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Women around the globe came around and showed solidarity with the women in Iran. However, in non-Islamic countries and societies, one can still make out many prejudices and stereotyping connected to the question of whether and to what extent veiling is mandatory for women according to Shārīe’ā law. Is wearing the hijab a choice, or rather, an essential religious practice that religious Muslim women need to obey? …

Rewriting The Playbook: The X’S And O’S Of The House Settlement And The Future Of Student-Athletes’ Voice In Their Compensation, Matthew K.V. Glazer

Seattle University Law Review

Since the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the 1900s, collegiate athletes (student-athletes) have been prohibited from using their own name, image and likeness (NIL) for profit. But on July 1, 2021, the NCAA changed course and began allowing student-athletes to profit from their own NIL. In the past few years, U.S. college athletics have undergone significant changes, most notably introducing monetary compensation for student-athletes’ NIL. While these changes were long overdue and ultimately beneficial, they have significantly disrupted the landscape of college sports, giving rise to numerous challenges that some experts have compared to the “Wild …

Mr. Trump Goes To Washington Part Ii: A Review Of Richard Delgado's 2025, Kevin Johnson

Seattle University Law Review

Richard Delgado’s The Rodrigo Chronicles have captivated a generation of law students and legal scholars.  Mapping the terrain of race, racism, and Critical Race Theory (CRT), the skillful, and long-running narrative series stands as a testament to Delgado’s dedication to justice for all.

The Rodrigo Chronicles are simply one of Delgado’s many intellectual contributions and part of an unparalleled scholarly legacy.  As one of the founders of CRT, he produced a landmark body of scholarship –authoring the field's primary text,  making the argument for the regulation of hate speech,  forcefully challenging the Black/white binary of civil rights that long dominated …

From Self-Representation To Smart Representation: How Ai & Self-Help Services Can Strengthen Pro Se Litigation, John W. Park

Journal of Law and Policy

The American legal system has long struggled with the gap between those who can afford counsel and those who cannot, leaving millions of pro se litigants to navigate complex civil proceedings alone and lose at staggering rates. Yet, over decades of incremental reform, existing self-help infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the growing pro se crisis or the rapid technological advancement that now gives represented parties an unprecedented advantage. Meanwhile, law firms and attorneys increasingly harness law firm tailored AI programs that are generally unavailable to the unrepresented litigant. This technological asymmetry has transformed an already significant capability gap …

Christian Lawyers In The Public Interest And Outside The Political Right, Jennifer Lee Koh

BYU Law Review

This Article provides an empirically based portrait of a population that is typically hidden from the public eye and has received scant attention in legal scholarship: Christian lawyers who engage in public interest work that falls outside the political right. Throughout the legal profession, lawyers who treat their Christian faith as a component of their professional identity and who actively endorse a politically conservative worldview are visible and active. With such lawyers’ increased prominence, growing political polarization, and reports of shifting levels of religiosity in the United States, the prospect of Christianity being perceived as synonymous with political conservatism seems …

The Martha Wright-Reed Act: How The Fcc Took One Step Forward For Communication Equality For Deaf Individuals In Correctional Facilities And How It Could Be Expanded, Ashley Seebold

Seattle University Law Review

For decades, phone companies preyed on incarcerated individuals and their loved ones due to the lack of regulation of jail phone calls.2 In 2021, the average cost of a fifteen-minute jail phone call was about $3.3 In 2022, the average cost rose to $5.74, while some individuals faced an extreme charge of $24.82 for the same amount of time.4 In the early 2000s, consumer advocate and concerned grandmother Martha Wright-Reed called upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to fix the imbalance so she could speak to her incarcerated grandson.5 Eventually, in 2023, the FCC answered her call to action and …

When Lawyers Protest, Renee Knake Jefferson

Michigan Law Review

A review of Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession. By Ray Brescia and a review of Canceling Lawyers: Case Studies of Accountability, Toleration, and Regret. By W. Bradley Wendel.

Teaching Telemachus: Learning To Live And Lead In A Flawed World, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

A review of The Odyssey By Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson.

The ‘Why’, The ‘What’, And The ‘How’ Of A Scholarly Life, Rosemary Salomone

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In this essay I explore the “why,” “what,” and “how” of legal scholarship, focusing on the arc of my own research and writing while also recognizing both commonalities and differences among legal scholars.

First, the “why.” For those of us who teach the law, legal scholarship involves the production and dissemination of knowledge in ways that both benefit our students and inform the law as it impacts public policy. Ideally, there is a synergy between what we write and what we teach. We incorporate into our teaching what we have learned from our research and from practice. At the …

From Prosecutor To Scholar: Voice, Power And The Pursuit Of Change, Elaine Chiu

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

It is a privilege to gather today with colleagues and students in our home, to spend time exchanging thoughts about the role of legal scholars and scholarship at this critical juncture in our school’s history and in our country’s history. I decided to focus my remarks today on the future of our country and our profession—and that is our students.

Let me start by sharing my own journey as a legal scholar. If you had told me when I was a law student or a young prosecutor that, one day, I would become a legal scholar, I would have …

The Evolution Of Legal Scholarship, Edward D. Cavanagh

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Historically, law schools have evaluated their faculty on performance in three areas: (1) classroom teaching; (2) service to their schools and the profession; and (3) scholarship. The criteria for classroom teaching and service have remained relatively constant over the years. However, the definition of scholarship has broadened significantly in recent decades. At the same time, courts—once reluctant to embrace academic research—are increasingly relying on academic scholarship to shape their legal opinions. This Essay analyses the evolution of academic scholarship and how that scholarship has impacted judicial decision making.