Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Shape Of A Life: Deborah L. Rhode In Memoriam, David Luban

Fordham Law Review

In this Essay honoring the life and work of Professor Deborah Rhode, Professor David Luban examines Professor Rhode's moral sensibility, which runs through all her writings, and situates this sensibility on a map of moral theories.

Deborah L. Rhode In Memoriam: Three Stories And Ten Life Lessons, Benjamin H. Barton

Fordham Law Review

In this Essay, Professor Benjamin H. Barton offers a heartfelt tribute to the late legal scholar, Professor Deborah L. Rhode. Professor Barton reflects on Rhode’s prolific career, which spanned areas including legal ethics, feminism and women in the law, and lawyers as leaders. He also examines Rhode’s later works, which delved into more personal topics such as character, ambition, and legacy. Through personal anecdotes and life lessons, Professor Barton honors Rhode’s legacy as a model academic, mentor, and transformative force in the legal profession.

An Ode To Rhode: In Principle And In Practice, Scott L. Cummings

Fordham Law Review

This Essay is a tribute to Professor Deborah L. Rhode by Professor Scott L. Cummings and discusses her legacy through the impact of her scholarship and leadership on both legal ethics and the community of legal ethics scholars. It reviews Deborah’s findings on pro bono in principle and in practice, revealing a Janus face—one that is built on altruism but used to benefit individual interests. This Essay shares Professor Cummings’s own experiences with Deborah as an inspirational and courageous individual who spoke truth to power to elevate the interests of those with less power and the ideal of lawyers as …

The Legal Ethics Of Family Separation, Milan Markovic

University of Richmond Law Review

On April 6, 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for individuals who crossed the U.S. border illegally. As part of this policy, the administration prosecuted parents with minor children for unlawful entry; previous administrations generally placed families in civil removal proceedings. Since U.S. law does not allow children to be held in immigration detention facilities pending their parents’ prosecution, the new policy caused thousands of children to be separated from their parents. Hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.

Despite a consensus that the family separation policy was cruel and ineffective, there has been minimal focus …

Why The 30 Percent Mansfield Rule Can't Work: A Supply-Demand Empirical Analysis Of Leadership In The Legal Profession, Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio

Fordham Law Review

The Mansfield Rule proposes that if 30 percent of the candidate pool is drawn from underrepresented groups, then a legal workplace will become more diverse and inclusive as a result. However, across the legal profession, statistics related to the numbers of women and other underrepresented groups in leadership roles continue to paint a bleak picture of diversity and inclusion. Professor Cecchi-Dimeglio’s Essay presents a supply-demand empirical analysis of the legal profession at the leadership level, and argues that the 30 percent Mansfield Rule ultimately does not enhance diversity in the legal profession, especially in leadership positions.

Rhode Was Right (About Character And Fitness), Leslie C. Levin

Fordham Law Review

In this Essay, Professor Leslie C. Levin revives Professor Deborah L. Rhode’s forty-year-old critique of the character and fitness process and shows that not much has changed. Levin exposes the process’s core problems, including the lack of public information available about character and fitness decisions, the process’s subjectivity, the disconnect between information sought and future lawyer misconduct, and the deterrent effect on individuals considering a legal career. Levin proposes that task forces reexamine problematic application questions, such as those targeting decriminalized conduct and mental health, and push for more transparency and disclosure.

John Osborn's Enduring Words On Law & Learning, Walter Effross

Popular Media

When I started my first year at Harvard Law School, 17 years after Osborn did, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. But I expected to be — and was — intimidated by Socratic taskmasters who, like the movie version of Osborn’s Professor Kingsfield (a role for which John Houseman won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1973), were ready with “always another question, another question to follow your answer.”

Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine N. Cimini, Doug Smith

Articles

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology …

Citation, Slavery, And The Law As Choice: Thoughts On Bluebook Rule 10.7.1(D), David J.S. Ziff

Articles

Today, more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, lawyers and judges continue to rely on antebellum decisions that tacitly or expressly approve of slavery. This reliance often occurs without any acknowledgement of the precedent’s immoral and legally dubious provenance. Modern use of these so-called “slave cases” was the subject of Professor Justin Simard’s 2020 article, Citing Slavery. In response to Professor Simard’s article, the latest edition of The Bluebook includes Rule 10.7.1(d), which requires authors to indicate parenthetically when a decision involves an enslaved person as a party or the property at issue. Unfortunately, Rule 10.7.1(d) …

Should Prosecutors Be Expected To Rectify Wrongful Convictions?, Bruce A. Green

Texas A&M Law Review

In 2008, the American Bar Association amended the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to address prosecutors’ post-conviction conduct. Model Rules 3.8(g) and (h) establish the remedial steps a prosecutor must take after achieving a criminal conviction when confronted with significant new evidence of an injustice. They require prosecutors to disclose the new exculpatory evidence and to take reasonable steps to initiate an investigation, and if clear and convincing evidence then establishes the convicted defendant’s innocence, the prosecutors’ office must take reasonable steps to rectify the injustice. Since then, 24 state judiciaries have adopted versions of one or both rules. Although …

What A Waste! An Evaluation Of Federal And State Medical And Biohazard Waste Regulations During The Covid-19 Pandemic And Their Impact On Environmental Justice, Samantha Newman

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Chapter 11: How Corporate Restructuring Has Evolved And Its Important Role In The Recovery Of A Struggling Economy, Eduardo Cervantes

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Covid-19 Vs. Constitution; Limited Government's Unlimited Response, John A. Losurdo

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The "No License, No Chips" Policy: When A Refusal To Deal Becomes Reasonable, Sheng Tong

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Dark Triad: Private Benefits Of Control, Voting Caps And The Mandatory Takeover Rule, Jorge Brito Pereira

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Repugnant Precedents And The Court Of History, Daniel B. Rice

Michigan Law Review

Aged Supreme Court precedents continue to tolerate many practices that would shock modern sensibilities. Yet the Court lacks standard tools for phasing out decisions that offend our national character. The very cultural shifts that have reoriented our normative universe have also insulated most repugnant precedents from direct attack. And the familiar stare decisis factors cannot genuinely explain what ails societally outmoded decisions. Even for justices inclined to condemn these embarrassments in less clinical terms, it is unclear what qualifies courts to make universalist claims about contemporary American values.

The Court recently sidestepped these difficulties by insisting that one of its …

Beavor V. Tomsheck, 138 Nev. Adv. Op. 71 (Nov. 10, 2022), Genell Maggiacomo

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

In an opinion written by Justice Hardesty, the Nevada Supreme Court evaluated whether assignment of proceeds towards an opponent in the same litigation where the legal malpractice arose is valid. The Nevada Supreme Court held that it is invalid because of the violation of public policy. The Court followed the precedent set out in Tower Homes, LLC v. Heaton, which held that assignments for legal malpractice claims prohibited public policy. The Court held that the district court ruled correctly by invalidating the assignment. However, an invalid assignment would not preclude an injured client from pursuing a legal malpractice claim where …

The Murder Of George Floyd: A Case Study Examining How The Policing Of Black Men And Grassroots Activism Influence The Will Of Black Women To Lead, Ella Gates-Mahmoud

Doctorate in Education

This study's objective investigates the viewpoints held by Black women in two urban areas of Minnesota about the social upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the last decade, police killings of innocent Black people in the United States have received more attention, and Floyd's death is only one example of this phenomenon. In the U.S., the likelihood of a police officer taking the life of a Black man is higher than that of a White man. Between 2013-2019 there have been 1,641 fatal shootings of defenseless Black men by …

Scaling Daos Through Fiduciary Duties, Alex Dolphin

BYU Law Review

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are a unique type of business organization due in large part to their directly democratic governance structure. Owners of DAOs, “tokenholders,” do not delegate control to a board or a general partner. Rather, tokenholders directly control a DAO and must approve every action that a DAO takes. Because tokenholders do not delegate control to an agent, the principal-agent problem is tempered in DAOs. The principal-agent problem is the basis for the fiduciary duties that govern traditional business organizations. These fiduciary duties are meant to prevent agents entrusted with power by their principals from self-dealing. Some have …

Place-Based Versus Practice-Based Norms For American Lawyers: "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

This Article acknowledges the growing trend toward practice-based lawyer norms, points out how it allows interaction between the existing place-based norms and the new practice-based norms, and compares this movement with the existing regulatory conditions outside the US. If there is movement from the world as we know it (place-based norms) to a world as it may come to be (practice-based norms), is the change tragic, inevitable, risky, in line with the rest of the global legal profession, or all of the above and more? Specifically, how would such an evolution affect the core duty of lawyer-client confidentiality?