Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is A Bad Deal, Jacob Burns Center For Ethics In The Practice Of Law

2021 Event Invitations

When Americans think of the criminal justice system, they picture a trial. The right to a trial by jury is supposed to undergird our entire justice system – but that bedrock constitutional right has all but disappeared thanks to plea bargaining. In 2018, more than 97 percent of defendants pleaded guilty.

In Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is A Bad Deal, Carissa Byrne Hessick makes the case against plea bargaining and illustrates why we need to fix it if we ever hope to achieve lasting criminal justice reform.

Join the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice …

Criticizing Judges: A Lawyer's Professional Responsibility, Lonnie T. Brown

Georgia Law Review

Lawyers, as officers of the court, are expected to act with deference and respect toward judges. Speaking sharply to or publicly criticizing members of the bench is frowned upon and not infrequently met with punitive responses. The judiciary, however, is not above reproach. Judges are fallible and may possess personal biases, tainting self-interest, or even prejudice. As such, at times, they must disqualify themselves if their ability to dispense justice fairly and impartially can reasonably be questioned. Indeed, the very nature of a judge’s role requires avoidance of even the “appearance of impropriety.” When judges fail to adhere to this …

Legal Ethics, Patrick Emery Longan

Mercer Law Review

This Survey covers the period from June 1, 2020, to May 31, 2021. The Article discusses developments concerning attorney discipline, bar admission and reinstatement, malpractice and other civil claims, ineffective assistance of counsel, disqualification of counsel and conflicts of interest, judicial conduct and recusal, attorney’s fees and liens, contempt, formal advisory opinions, amendments to the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, and one miscellaneous matter.

The Importance Of Ethics In The Practice Of Mediation, Dorcas Quek Anderson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

What is the predominant function of ethics for the mediation profession in Singapore? Do ethical principles assume greater significance in light of increasing institutionalisation of mediation programmes in Singapore? What can mediators, mediation advocates and mediation institutions do to ensure consistent adherence to ethical standards? These and other related issues were discussed in a webinar organised by the Singapore Academy of Law in May 2021 featuring Lim Tat, Chuan Wee Meng and this author as panellists, together with See Chern Yang as moderator. This article highlights the notable discussion points of the webinar, including the significance of mediation ethics, common …

The Risk Of Zealous Advocacy: Litigators Receiving Anonymously Disclosed Documents And The Notification Requirement, Rebecca J. Spendley

Fordham Law Review

The American Bar Association (ABA) created the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to provide guidance to lawyers, courts, and the entire legal profession regarding what a lawyer’s ethical duties entail. Model Rule 4.4(b) requires a lawyer to notify opposing counsel once the receiving lawyer knows, or reasonably should know, that the documents received were inadvertently sent. The ABA, however, explicitly left documents disclosed intentionally and without authorization beyond the scope of the rules, thus leaving lawyers who receive these documents with little guidance. Courts have taken varying approaches to handling documents of this type: some analogize unauthorized disclosures to inadvertent …

Who Tells Their Stories?: Examining The Role, Duties, And Ethical Constraints Of The Victim’S Attorney Under Model Rule 3.6, Ksenia Matthews

Fordham Law Review

In U.S. criminal proceedings, the prosecution typically presents the victim’s story. However, as part of the victims’ rights movement, victims are striving to make their voices heard and tell their stories in their own words. Yet, despite the growing role victims occupy in criminal proceedings and the rights afforded to victims by the Crime Victims’ Rights Act and its state counterparts, victims still remain nonparties in criminal proceedings. As victims increasingly retain private lawyers to help navigate criminal proceedings and represent their interests, it is important to understand how these lawyers fall within the traditional two-party adversary system. Limited by …

Autonomous Weapons Systems And The Procedural Accounta- Bility Gap, Afonso Seixas-Nunes

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The development and well-established principles of Internationla Humanitarian Law have been progressively establishing limits to the means and methods of warfare. Those principles and rules are necessarily applicable to future autonomous weapon systems (AWS), but questions regarding liability for violations of IHL caused by AWS have been looming the international debate. This article has two parts. The first part aims to identify a technical dimension of AWS that has been neglected by international lawyers: States responsibility for IHL violations caused by errors in AWS’ software. This article argues that “errors” can neither be identified with “malfunctions” nor attributed to human …

Roberta Karmel And The "Brooklyn School", Edward J. Janger

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In this contribution, Professor Janger describes Roberta Karmel’s extraordinary contributions to the intellectual, scholarly, and institutional life of Brooklyn Law School.

Karmel’S Dissent: The Sec’S Use And Occasional Misuse Of Section 21(A) Reports Of Investigation, James J. Park

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act gives the SEC the option of publishing a report of its findings after conducting an investigation. Typically, the SEC issues such reports about once a year to highlight major compliance and enforcement issues. This Article examines the SEC’s use of Section 21(a) investigative reports with special attention to its 1979 report in Spartek, where Commissioner Roberta Karmel filed a famous dissent. In that opinion, she argued that the report effectively sanctioned conduct over which the SEC did not have jurisdiction and that Spartek did not have sufficient notice of its regulatory obligations. While …

“The Eu Challenge To The Sec”: A View From 2021, Howell E. Jackson

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This essay offers a retrospective appreciation of Professor Roberta Karmel’s scholarship exploring the influence of securities regulation in the United States on developments in European capital markets regulation in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Professor Karmel’s writings document a fascinating evolution in this trans-Atlantic relationship as the Securities and Exchange Commission transitioned from the world’s dominant capital market regulator throughout most of the post-World War II era into a more collaborative posture by the end of the first decade of the Millennium. The essay concludes by suggesting that the trends that Professor Karmel chronicled in her scholarship have persisted …

Free Justice: A History Of The Public Defender In Twentieth-Century America, Kate Levine

Articles

Levine reviews Free justice: A history of the public defender in twentieth-century America. By Sara Mayeux. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 286 pp. $26.95 paperback.

Title 42, Asylum, And Politicising Public Health, Michael Ulrich, Sondra S. Crosby

Faculty Scholarship

President Biden has continued the controversial immigration policy of the Trump era known as Title 42, which has caused harm and suffering to scores of asylum seekers under the guise of public health.1 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the policy in March 2020 with the stated purpose of limiting the spread of the coronavirus into the U.S.; though, CDC and public health officials have admitted this policy has no scientific basis and there is no evidence it has protected the public.2,3 Instead, the impetus behind the policy appears to be a desire to keep out or …

The Covid-19 Pandemic, Diversity And Inclusion, And The Practice Of Law, Jacob Burns Center For Ethics In The Practice Of Law

2021 Event Invitations

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed preexisting weaknesses in many areas of life and the law. In April 2021, the ABA published a study entitled Practicing Law in the Pandemic and Moving Forward: Results and Best Practices From a Nationwide Survey of The Legal Profession. The results of this study confirmed what many women and people of color already knew – standard approaches to the workplace do not serve goals of diversity and inclusion, especially during times of great stress and financial uncertainty.

On November 8th, the Burns Center will host the authors of this study and JoAnne Epps, Senior …

A Human Being Wrote This Law Review Article: Gpt-3 And The Practice Of Law, Amy B. Cyphert

Law Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence tools can now “write” in such a sophisticated manner that they fool people into believing that a human wrote the text. None are better at writing than GPT-3, released in 2020 for beta testing and coming to commercial markets in 2021. GPT-3 was trained on a massive dataset that included scrapes of language from sources ranging from the NYTimes to Reddit boards. And so, it comes as no surprise that researchers have already documented incidences of bias where GPT-3 spews toxic language. But because GPT-3 is so good at “writing,” and can be easily trained to write in …

On Time, (In)Equality, And Death, Fred O. Smith Jr.

Michigan Law Review

In recent years, American institutions have inadvertently encountered the bodies of former slaves with increasing frequency. Pledges of respect are common features of these discoveries, accompanied by cultural debates about what “respect” means. Often embedded in these debates is an intuition that there is something special about respecting the dead bodies, burial sites, and images of victims of mass, systemic horrors. This Article employs legal doctrine, philosophical insights, and American history to both interrogate and anchor this intuition.

Law can inform these debates because we regularly turn to legal settings to resolve disputes about the dead. Yet the passage of …

Case Study: The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia’S Court Transcripts In Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian—Part 1: Needs, Feasibility, And Output Assessment, Besmir Fidahić

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) remains the most important organization for the past, the present, and the future of the former Yugoslavia. Faced with a country that always lived under totalitarian regimes with very little insight into actions of the groups and individuals who reaped unthinkable havoc on each other at the end of the twentieth century, the ICTY set undisputable historical record about events that took place during the 1991–1999 wars and put the country on an excellent track towards transformation for the better. But even 28 years since the establishment of the ICTY, the former …

Negative Commentary—Negative Consequences: Legal Ethics, Social Media, And The Impact Of Explosive Commentary, Jan L. Jacobowitz Ms.

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Connecting and sharing on social media has opened communication channels and provided instantaneous information to billions of people worldwide. Commentary on current events, cases, and negative online reviews may be posted in an instant, often without pause or thought about the potential repercussions. This global phenomenon may not only provide news of the day updates, humor, and support for those in need but also is replete with ethical landmines for the unwary lawyer. Lawyers commenting on current events, their cases, or responding to a client’s negative online review, have suffered damage to their careers. In some instances, they have even …

The Informed Consent Doctrine In Legal Malpractice Law, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The doctrine of informed consent is now deeply embedded into the law of legal ethics. In legal malpractice litigation, the doctrine holds that a lawyer has a duty to disclose to a client material information about the risks and alternatives associated with a course of action. A lawyer who fails to make such required disclosures and fails to obtain informed consent is negligent, regardless of whether the lawyer otherwise exercises care in representing a client. If such negligent nondisclosures cause damages, the lawyer can be held accountable for the client’s losses.

Shifting the focus of a legal malpractice action from …

Ethical Duty To Investigate Your Client?, Peter A. Joy

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Lawyers have been implicated in corporate scandals and other client crimes or frauds all too often, and the complicity of some lawyers is troubling both to the public and to members of the legal profession. This is especially true when the crime involved is money laundering. As a response to attorney involvement in crimes or frauds, some legal commentators have called for changes to the ethics rules to require lawyers to investigate their clients and client transactions under some circumstances rather than remaining “consciously” or “willfully” blind to what may be illegal or fraudulent conduct. The commentators argue that such …

Sufficiently Judicial: The Need For A Universal Ethics Rule On Attorney Behavior In Legislative Impeachment Trials, Joshua E. Kastenberg

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In assessing an ethics, rule-based prohibition against New Jersey governmental attorneys representing clients against the state for matters the state had previously assigned to them, the state supreme court noted: “In our representative form of government, it is essential that the conduct of public officials and employees shall hold the respect and confidence of the people.”

In the beginning of 2020, the United States Senate held an impeachment trial to determine whether former President Donald J. Trump had committed offenses forwarded by the House of Representatives. A U.S. Senate trial, much like state senate trials, is both judicial and political …