Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Should Legal Writing Professors Continue To Teach Traditional Legal Citation Rules For Parentheticals Despite The Increased Usage Of (Cleaned Up) Parentheticals?, Donna L. Eng

UF Law Faculty Publications

With the rise of (cleaned up) citations from practitioners and courts, Legal Writing Professors should continue to teach traditional legal citation rules for parentheticals. Teaching traditional legal citations for parentheticals will not only prepare students for the real world of legal writing expected by many courts, but will also help them to avoid ethical pitfalls that may result from the use of (cleaned up) citations. The author also calls for a return to the use of traditional legal citation rules for parentheticals to mitigate any further impacts on the evolution of jurisprudence, and to comply with a lawyer’s ethical duty …

Don’T Be Cruel: Cruelty, Complicity, Self-Knowledge, And Growth, Sherman J. Clark

Articles

The papers in this symposium, and the larger body of scholarship to which this symposium is a contribution, ask us to attend to the often brutal and inhumane conditions in American jails and prisons. But why should we do that? Why should we confront the suffering of the incarcerated? Why should we ask ourselves whether that suffering is unjust, unnecessary, or even unconstitutional? The main reason, of course, is that we want to remedy those injustices. We care about the suffering of our fellow human beings, and people do not cease to be our fellow human beings merely because they …

Clinical Use Of Placebos: Medicine, Neuroscience, Ethics And The Law, Steven B. Perlmutter

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

My patient, a twenty-eight year old woman, presented with a three-week history of constant twitching of her left lower eyelid. She found it distracting and annoying, albeit it did not impair her vision. She had no other ocular symptomatology. Past ocular and medical histories were unremarkable, and she took no medications. She was preoccupied with a toxic divorce, which was traumatizing her eight-year-old son. She noted difficulty falling and staying asleep. Six weeks prior, her internist pronounced her a healthy but stressed woman. My examination revealed left lower orbicularis myokymia, i.e., spontaneous, involuntary twitching of the left lower eyelid. Her …

Panel Four: Finding A Silver Lining In The Darkest Clouds: How Today's Economic Crisis Creates Opportunities For Reform And Cost Savings In The Administration Of The Death Penalty, Tony Mauro, Jean Faria, Jon B. Gould, Elizabeth (Libby) Sykes, Malcolm R. Hunter

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

Panel Three: Unique Ethical Dilemmas In Capital Representation, Penny J. White, Sean O'Brien, Mary Ann Green, Ann Short-Bowers

Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

The Unintended Costs Of Advance Waivers Of Future Conflicts, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

The American Bar Association (“ABA”) unenthusiastically recognized advance waivers of future conflicts for the first time in a 1993 formal opinion. These allow lawyers to take on prospective clients whose interests will be adverse to current clients at some point in the future. They also sidestep the ethics rule requirement of obtaining true informed consent from a client to waive a conflict of interest because, at the time of signing, the conflict is not yet ripe. After a full-court press by its own Business Law Section Ad Hoc Committee during the Ethics 2000 Commission’s review of the Model Rules of …

Maurer School Of Law Professor, Iu Vice President Elected President Of The American Society Of Comparative Law, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The American Society of Comparative Law has elected Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor Hannah L. Buxbaum as its next president, the organization announced last week at its annual meeting.

Buxbaum is an internationally recognized scholar in the areas of private international law and international litigation and jurisdiction, and has most recently served as vice president of the ASCL. She is the John E. Schiller Chair in Legal Ethics at the Law School as well as Indiana University’s Vice President for International Affairs.

New York’S Unregulated Litigation Lending Industry, Heather R. Abraham, Maura Graham

Other Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legislative Ethics: Improper Influence By A Lawmaker On An Administrative Agency, Mark W. Lawrence

Maine Law Review

Moral and ethical dilemmas are inherent in the legislative process. Representative democracy raises a fundamental ethical conflict for lawmakers: choosing between representing constituent views or following personal convictions. Recent moral crises of elected officials have demonstrated the complex, diverse, and problematic nature of political ethics, yet the belief that these guardians of the public trust must successfully distinguish among the subtle distinctions of political ethics remains an integral tenet of American political thought. One of the most perplexing moral dilemmas a legislator faces is deciding what degree of influence can be exerted on an administrative agency to obtain a result …

Solicitation By Lawyers: Piercing The First Amendment Veil, Louise L. Hill

Maine Law Review

Historically, the legal profession has considered the solicitation of business inappropriate. The profession has articulated this condemnation of solicitation, which developed as a principle of good taste among a small and homogeneous group of practitioners, in the form of specific rules prohibiting its members from engaging in certain forms of conduct. In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has considered various rules that restrict the commercial speech of lawyers. Reviewing these proscriptive rules, the Court struck down categorical bans on lawyer advertising and targeted, direct mail solicitation as violative of the first amendment. Because the free flow of information …

Cy Pres Silliness: Remedies That Do Not Remediate The Harm, Phil Pillari

Northwestern University Law Review

Class actions play an important role in civil litigation, but they suffer from a serious problem. No matter how many plaintiffs are in the class, the individual claims are often miniscule, which can make distributing the inevitable settlement futile. Very few people make a claim, and it often costs more to mail the check than the check is worth. To solve this problem, Steven Shepherd proposed importing the cy pres doctrine (a trusts and estates device that allows courts to rewrite an unenforceable trust) into the class actions context. Shepherd’s framework instructs courts to devise the next best alternative for …

Client Confidentiality As Data Security, Jonah E. Perlin

Washington Law Review

The duty of confidentiality has been a cornerstone of the attorney-client relationship for more than four centuries. Historically, this duty was not difficult to discharge. All a lawyer had to do to comply was not affirmatively share client information in public without consent. But that has all changed. The same technologies that provide unprecedented benefits of authorized access by lawyers and their clients create unprecedented risks of unauthorized access by others. As a result, although the duty of confidentiality was once synonymous with a duty to keep client confidences secret, today the duty necessitates that lawyers keep client confidences secure …

Client Confidentiality As Data Security, Jonah Perlin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The duty of confidentiality has been a cornerstone of the attorney-client relationship for more than four centuries. Historically, this duty was not difficult to discharge. All a lawyer had to do to comply was not affirmatively share client information in public without consent. But that has all changed. The same technologies that provide unprecedented benefits of authorized access by lawyers and their clients create unprecedented risks of unauthorized access by others. As a result, although the duty of confidentiality was once synonymous with a duty to keep client confidences secret, today the duty necessitates that lawyers keep client confidences secure …

Ethical Guardrails To Unbounded Procedure, Seth Katsuya Endo

Fordham Law Review

Civil lawsuits in federal courts—especially class actions and multidistrict litigation (MDL)—can be messy and complicated, calling for pragmatic interventions that lie beyond what is explicitly addressed by the existing rules. And flexibility is part of the genius of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. On the other hand, unbounded discretion and innovation in procedure can lead to illegitimate exercises of power, bias, democratic nonaccountability, and other serious harms. But the choice is not between providing individual courts with nearly limitless authority to experiment with procedure or having a set of rigid rules. Instead, there is a third path: district judges …

Discrimination, Model Rule 8.4(G), And The Aba’S Quixotic Quest For Uniformity, Alex B. Long

Washington and Lee Law Review

Under American Bar Association (“ABA”) Model Rule 8.4(g), it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct related to the practice of law that the lawyer knows, or reasonably should know, is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics. Widespread concerns over the breadth and lack of clarity concerning the rule have triggered substantial criticism, including the refusal of multiple states to adopt this model rule. Instead, several states have responded by introducing alternative versions of Model Rule 8.4(g) or by applying older rules of professional conduct in the case of discriminatory speech …

Abolish The Mpre, Michael Ariens

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In nearly every jurisdiction, applicants to the bar must pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE). Its purpose, according to its owner, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), is “to measure candidates’ knowledge and understanding of established standards related to the professional conduct of lawyers.” It does test whether an examinee has kept in short-term memory the rules and exceptions that make up part of the understanding of what it means to serve as a lawyer. However, success (or initial failure) on the MPRE has not been correlated with ethical conduct or misconduct. For example, the Texas Board of …

Legal Malpractice In Florida: A Statistical Profile, Robert M. Jarvis, Debra Moss Vollweiler

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Little empirical research exists about the incidence of legal malpractice. To help fill the gap, the authors spent 1,000 hours mining the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation’s legal malpractice database, a rich but underutilized resource. As their results make clear, every lawyer—no matter their gender, education, location, experience, or type of practice—is at risk of being sued for legal malpractice.

Self-Discipline, Faith, And Civility: Promoting A Civil Society And Lawyer Professionalism, Honorable Douglas S. Lang

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

All lawyers are bound to assiduously adhere to the Law, including the strictures of legal ethics, professionalism, and all secular law. Moreover, lawyers of faith must adhere to the tenants of their faith as a way of life. The principles of those two sets of imperatives are not only compatible, they are inextricably intertwined. Together, they compel lawyers to treat others civilly and with respect and dignity. This paper demonstrates that lawyers, particularly Catholic lawyers, must unselfishly and civilly live their lives in a way to combat the scourge of incivility in the legal profession and in society. All …

Restoring The Public’S Faith: Character Education And The Supreme Court, Benjamin Rigney

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The current news cycle is full of reports on the alleged ethical scandals rocking the Supreme Court. A significant result of these ethical failures is rapidly declining public trust in the Supreme Court as an institution, which in turn negatively impacts the public’s trust in the entire legal system. The role of judicial ethics is fundamental to the American legal system as illustrated in Charles Geyh’s article, The Architecture of Judicial Ethics, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Amanda Frost’s article, Judicial Ethics and Supreme Court Exceptionalism, published in the Georgetown Journal of Legal …

The Impact The Monetary Value Of A Case Has On Effort And Productivity Within The Field Of Personal Injury, Maximiliano Elizondo

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

No abstract provided.