Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Legal Imitation Game: Generative Ai’S Incompatibility With Clinical Legal Education, Jake Karr, Jason Schultz

Fordham Law Review

In this Essay, we briefly describe key aspects of [generative artificial intelligence] that are particularly relevant to, and raise particular risks for, its potential use by lawyers and law students. We then identify three foundational goals of clinical legal education that provide useful frameworks for evaluating technological tools like GenAI: (1) practice readiness, (2) justice readiness, and (3) client-centered lawyering. First is “practice readiness,” which is about ensuring that students have the baseline abilities, knowledge, and skills to practice law upon graduation. Second is “justice readiness,” a concept proposed by Professor Jane Aiken, which is about teaching law students to …

Burden Of The Bargain: Ineffective Assistance Of Counsel Claims In The Absence Of A Plea Offer, Sriram H. Ramesh

Fordham Law Review

The modern criminal justice system in the United States is a “system of pleas.” Plea bargains have largely supplanted trials as the primary method of resolving criminal proceedings in this country. Acknowledging their prevalence, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel extends to the plea-bargaining process. Thus, defendants may bring ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) claims for alleged ineffectiveness during the plea-bargaining phase.

In two companion cases, Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Court held that its two-pronged test for IAC, laid out in Strickland v. Washington, …

The Profit Principle: Tracing The Moral Decline Of Corporate Law Firms, Sung Hui Kim

Michigan Law Review

A review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice. By David Enrich.

A Threshold Assessment: Is Technology Among The Competencies Tested By The Mpre?, Amy A. Emerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Her Seat At The Table: A Phenomenological Study Exploring The Lived Experiences Of Black Women Education Policymakers, Vickey R. Silas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This transcendental phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of Black women leaders as education policymakers to understand the essence of their journey to leadership positions and the impetus behind their decision-making. Despite progress, Black women remain marginalized and underrepresented in policymaking leadership roles and decision-making spaces (Griffin et. al, 2013). They face challenges that are intersectional like gender and race. My research question was what are the lived experiences of Black women education policymakers and how do these experiences impact their decision-making? While employing a transcendental phenomenological approach, I acknowledged my biases through reflexivity and bracketed them while also …

Boden Lecture: Of Chameleons And Esg, Ann M. Lipton

Marquette Law Review

Ever since the rise of the great corporations in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, commenters have debated whether firms should be run

solely to benefit investors, or whether instead they should be run to benefit

society as a whole. Both sides have claimed their preferred policies are

necessary to maintain a capitalist system of private enterprise distinct from

state institutions. What we can learn from the current iteration of the debate—

now rebranded as “environmental, social, governance” or “ESG” investing—

is that efforts to disentangle corporate governance from the regulatory state

are futile; governmental regulation has an inevitable …

Duties Regarding Duties, Ronald J. Colombo

Marquette Law Review

Corporate directors are subject to the fiduciary duties of care and loyalty

in the discharge of their responsibilities. The demands of these duties, from

their precise contours to their application under a particular set of

circumstances, is oftentimes far from obvious.

In order to properly fulfill their duties of care and loyalty, corporate

directors necessarily depend upon corporate counsel: specialized attorneys,

whether in-house or external to the corporation, retained to advise and

represent the corporation. As attorneys, corporate counsel are themselves

subject to a wide array of professional responsibilities, ranging from the

exhortations of codes of ethics to duties the …

Judging The Judiciary, Amanda B. Hurst

Georgia State University Law Review

Judicial legitimacy not only depends on judges maintaining the high ethical standards imposed on them but also on the public believing judges will be held accountable when they break the rules. However, judges are often viewed as “getting away with it.” This Article focuses on how to improve this problematic perception of state judicial discipline systems (JDSs). Part of the answer is more exposure, including a social media presence, for judicial discipline commissions (JDCs), the bodies in each state responsible for resolving misconduct complaints and recommending or imposing sanctions, because the public and media have a similar flawed understanding of …

Should State Trial Courts Become Laboratories Of Upl Reform?, Bruce A. Green

Fordham Law Review

There is a growing “access to justice” movement that is principally driven by lawyers and judges. It has multiple objectives. One such objective is to make state court proceedings fairer, more reliable, and more accessible. This is important because state courts have a significant impact on peoples’ lives. They are where family members lose custody of children, where property owners obtain permission to evict tenants, where creditors are empowered to repossess people’s cars or garnish their wages, and (in some jurisdictions) where judges send people to jail to compel them to pay judgments or fees that they cannot afford to …

Judicial Discipline Through The Prism Of Public Law Values: A Contextual Analysis Of Bill C-9, An Act To Reform The Judges Act, Richard Devlin, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Bill C-9 is the first significant legislative reform to the Judges Act in five decades. The goal of the legislation is to enhance public confidence in the administration of justice by modernizing the complaints and discipline regime for federally appointed judges. This essay is a contextual analysis of Bill C-9. The authors begin by outlining a conceptual framework which identifies eight public law goods that can guide an assessment of a complaints and discipline system. They then locate Bill C-9 in a historical context by identifying a crisis of legitimacy that had overtaken the Canadian Judicial Council by the early …

Foreword: The Legal Profession And Social Change, Atinuke O. Adediran, Bruce A. Green

Fordham Law Review

Fordham University School of Law’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics has collaborated with the Fordham Law Review every year since the late 1990s to encourage, collect, and publish scholarly writings on different aspects of the legal profession, including its norms, regulation, organization, history, and development—that is, on themes relating to what law schools loosely call “legal ethics.” The legal profession is an important subject of study for legal scholars, among others. Although one U.S. Supreme Court Justice, himself a former law professor, airily derided legal ethics as the “least analytically rigorous . . . of law-school subjects,” we dispute …

Regulating The Public Defender Identity, Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe

Fordham Law Review

The public defender institution has trouble meeting its mission. This is partly because, despite the specific and clear purpose of representing indigent defendants in criminal proceedings, public defender offices rely on various centering principles to meet this objective. The institution falters if it chooses a centering principle that unwittingly complicates its ability to meet the institution’s central mission. For public defender leaders tasked with developing and maintaining an institutional identity for a particular office, neither legal nor professional regulations supply the type of considerations that guarantee that an adopted identity will comply with core institutional responsibilities. This project seeks to …

Baselining Historical And Cultural Context For Law Students: Aba Standard 303(C) And New York Law School’S “Community Days: Law In Context” Programme, Anthony W. Crowell

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Re-Evaluating Gpt-4’S Bar Exam Performance, Eric H. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most widely touted of GPT-4’s at-launch, zero-shot capabilities has been its reported 90th-percentile performance on the Uniform Bar Exam. This paper begins by investigating the methodological challenges in documenting and verifying the 90th-percentile claim, presenting four sets of findings that indicate that OpenAI’s estimates of GPT-4’s UBE percentile are overinflated. First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population. Second, data from a recent …

Come, Let Us Reason Together, Hon. Kent A. Jordan, James J. Brudney

Jurist in Residence Lectures

In his lecture, Judge Kent A. Jordan emphasizes the critical importance of civil discourse in addressing complex legal and social issues. He explores the dangers of abandoning reasoned debate for heated rhetoric and the negative impacts this can have on the legal profession and society at large.

Interpreting Ethics Rules, Samuel J. Levine

Pepperdine Law Review

This Article explores the interpretation of ethics rules through the prism of two rules that have been the subject of ongoing controversy and contention: Rule 4.2, the “no-contact” rule, which prohibits a lawyer from communicating with a represented client absent the consent of that client’s lawyer, and Rule 8.4(g), which prohibits various forms of discrimination and harassment. Each of these rules provides a model for a wider examination of different interpretive approaches to ethics rules, grounded in different attitudes toward the features and functions of ethics codes. Specifically, the debate revolving around Rule 4.2 illustrates competing approaches to interpreting a …

Gray Areas In Green Claims: Why Greenwashing Regulation Needs An Overhaul, Valerie J. Peterson

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Abortion Politics And The Rise Of Movement Jurists, Robert L. Tsai, Mary Ziegler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article employs the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and litigation in its wake as the jumping off point to reconsider the connections between judges, the Constitution, and social movements. That movements influence constitutional law, and that judicial pronouncements in turn are reshaped by politics, is well-established. But, while these accounts of legal change depend upon judges to embrace movement ideas, less has been written about the conditions under which judicial entrenchment can be expected to take place. There may, in fact, be different types of judicial dispositions towards external political phenomena.

In this Article, …

Examining The Examiner: An Amicus Brief On Conflicts Between Forensic Technology And Indigenous Religious Freedoms In Favor Of Virtual Autopsies, Peyton James

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Navigating The Conundrum Of Mandatory Reporting Under The Pocso Act: Implications For Medical Professionals, Nanditta Batra

Articles

To address the under reporting of sexual offences against children, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, makes reporting of such offences mandatory. The duty to report such offences has been extended to healthcare professionals. The inclusion of healthcare professionals within mandatory reporting, however, strikes at the very foundation of the doctor-patient relationship based on trust and confidentiality and conflicts with the patient confidentiality safeguards of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. It also has unintended public health consequences, such as denial of medical termination of pregnancy due to fear of prosecution under POCSO. An urgent reassessment of …