Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Debate Over Disclosure In Third-Party Litigation Finance: Balancing The Need For Transparency With Efficiency, Alec J. Manfre

Brooklyn Law Review

The market for third-party litigation financing (TPLF) in the United States is facing unprecedented growth and popularity. The ever-increasing complexity and cost of legal disputes, especially in the commercial context, has made third-party financing an invaluable resource for both litigants in need of capital and investors seeking to diversify their portfolios with nontraditional assets. However, as the market continues to boom, so does the risk that TPLF will be used unethically. Critics of the industry are calling on regulators at both the state and federal levels to implement comprehensive disclosure requirements for TPLF at the outset of all civil litigation …

Ethical Dilemma: Police Access To Private Internet Data An Analysis Of The Ecpa Of 1986, Its Effects On The St. Louis Area, And The Proposed Solutions To Remedy This Outdated Document., Amber Essary

Undergraduate Research Symposium

My research was focused on the ethical dilemma of police access to private internet data and how it pertains to the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. This work contains a case study of serial killer Maury Travis, an overview of the history of the ECPA, an argument for why police should have access to private data, an ethical analysis of the two solutions to this dilemma, and an argument for what solution I believe to be the best one. My research concluded that the two possible solutions to this dilemma were to revise the ECPA or to …

Ending Injustice: Solving The Initial Appearance Crisis, Pamela R. Metzger, Janet C. Hoeffel, Kristin Meeks, Sandra Sidi

Deason Center Reports

Most Americans expect that if they are arrested, they will quickly appear before a judge, learn about the charges, and have an attorney assigned to defend them. The reality is vastly different. After arrest, a person can wait in jail for days, weeks, or even months before seeing a judge or meeting an attorney. This report chronicles the resulting initial appearance crisis and highlights its devastating consequences. More importantly, it provides policymakers and advocates with actionable recommendations.

Wandering With Artificial Intelligence And Its Obscure Legal Liability, Muhammad Pasha Nur Fauzan, Darian Amarta, Evan Tobias, Vikri Ricardo, Melania Fidela G.

Indonesia Law Review

The high level of autonomy of AI will raise the problem of legal liability at some point in the future. If AI’s behaviour causes an illegal consequence, who to held liable? This article will explore the problem concerning legal liability of AI into two main discussion. The first discussion will explore the possibility of imposing legal liability of AI to human. This part will discuss various available option to solve the AI liability problem by imposing legal liability on either users or manufacturers. While the second discussion will explore the possibility of imposing legal liability of AI to AI itself. …

"I Wish There Was A Treaty We Could Sign": An Inquiry Into The Making Of The Global Pact For The Environment, Marie-Catherine Petersmann

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article provides ethnographic insights into the making of the latest UN-backed instrument for transnational environmental law and governance: the Global Pact for the Environment (GPE). It narrates the rise and fall of a contemporary policy project designed to unify and strengthen international environmental law. The story starts in 2015 on the premises of a Parisian legal think tank and ends in May 2019 at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, where states ultimately decided not to adopt the GPE as a legally binding instrument but opted to prepare apolitical declaration to be presented in 2022 …

What An Ethics Of Discourse And Recognition Can Contribute To A Critical Theory Of Refugee Claim Adjudication, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thanks to Axel Honneth, recognition theory has become a prominent fixture of critical social theory. In recent years, he has deployed his recognition theory in diagnosing pathologies and injustices that afflict institutional practices. Some of these institutional practices revolve around specifically juridical institutions, such as human rights and democratic citizenship, that directly impact the lives of the most desperate migrants. Hence it is worthwhile asking what recognition theory can add to a critical theory of migration. In this paper, I argue that, although its contribution to a critical theory of migration is limited, it nonetheless carves out a unique body …

Sword And Shield: The Georgia Supreme Court Adopts Third-Party Waiver Of Attorney-Client Privilege, D. Garrett White

Mercer Law Review

The attorney-client privilege is generally held out as a sacred instrument (a shield) reserved for clients and used by attorneys for the benefit of those clients. Persons untrained in the law tend to have a basic understanding of what the attorney-client privilege is and can often explain in a rudimentary sense what it protects. What few non-lawyers realize, however, is that the privilege is not absolute, and is waivable under certain, limited, circumstances. Now, it seems that shield is losing its integrity in the realm of legal malpractice.

In January 2020, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Hill, Kertscher & …

Federalism In The Algorithmic Age, Chad Squitieri

Duke Law & Technology Review

No abstract provided.

Frivolous Defenses, Thomas D. Russell

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article is about civil procedure, torts, insurance, litigation, and professional ethics. The Article is the opening article in a conversation with Stanford Law Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom, who has written about the plaintiffs’ bar and settlement mill attorneys. The empirical center of this piece examines 356 answers to 298 car crash personal injury cases in Colorado’s district courts. The Article situates these cases within dispute pyramid elements, including the total number of miles-traveled within Colorado and the volume of civil litigation. The Article then analyzes the defense attorneys’ departures from the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure, especially Rule 8. …

Legal Lying?, Robert Angyal, Nicholas Saady

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Mediation has become very common in the USA and Australia—at least partly because of court-mandated mediation initiatives. Lawyers often represent clients at mediations, so the increased use of mediation makes it important to understand how both jurisdictions regulate lawyers’ advocacy on behalf of their clients during mediation. This article comparatively analyzes how professional standards regulate the truthfulness of lawyers’ advocacy during mediation in Australia and the United States. It focuses on uniform regulation in those jurisdictions. Part One will comparatively analyze the relevant regulations in Australia and the United States, and the types of obligations contained in those regulations—for example, …

A Firm Pillar Of Local Justice: The Failures Of The New York Town And Village Justice Courts Supporting Statewide Adoption Of The District Court Model, Noah Sexton

Journal of Law and Policy

Town and village justice courts have been the center of municipal law, both civil and criminal, since the mid-nineteenth century. However, in the modern world, they have become corrupt, poorly managed institutions, creating issues involving procedural integrity and civil rights. In order to remedy these failures and modernize the New York State Unified Court System, state legislators must look to the district court model as it currently exists in Nassau and Eastern Suffolk Counties. The district court model offers several benefits, including the imposition of educational and experiential requirements for judges, the creation of internal and external oversight institutions, the …

Session 1: Access To Legal Services - The Role Of Innovation And Technology, Steven Bender, Stacy Butler, Anna Carpenter, Michael Cherry, Sands Mckinley, Kimball Dean Parker, Miguel Willis

SITIE Symposiums

This expert panel is addressing access to justice problems. People without access to lawyers and legal services suffer in many ways not limited to divorce, domestic violence, and educational roadblocks. This panel will ask what lawyers can do to help, in what ways can technology help or replace lawyers in the delivery of legal and non-legal services. It will also explore different legal services being offered by individuals who do not have a JD, online firms, and developing technology in a law firm owed subsidiary. There are six panelists who are broken into two categories: (1) the innovation and delivery …

Moral Truth And Constitutional Conservatism, Gerard V. Bradley

Louisiana Law Review

Conservative constitutionalism is committed to "originalism," that is, to interpreting the Constitution according to its original public understanding. This defining commitment of constitutional interpretation is sound. For decades, however, constitutional conservatives have diluted it with a methodology of restraint, a normative approach to the judicial task marked by an overriding aversion to critical moral reasoning. In any event, the methodology eclipsed originalism and the partnership with moral truth that originalism actually entails. Conservative constitutionalism is presently a mélange of mostly unsound arguments against the worst depredations of Casey's Mystery Passage. The reason for the methodological moral reticence is easy to …

Machiavelli And The Bar: Ethical Limitations On Lying In Negotiation, James J. White

Book Chapters

This article addresses the general question of truthfulness in the process of negotiation, as that question is faced in Rule 4.2 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The obligation to behave truthfully in negotiation is embodied in the requirement of Rule 4.2(a) that directs the lawyer to “be fair in dealing with other participants.” The article then presents five cases which show that one does not and cannot intend that a negotiator be “truthful” in the broadest sense of that term. It would be unfortunate, therefore, for the rule that requires “fairness” to be interpreted to require that a …

The Ethical Path: The True Significance Of Saenz Versus Roe And The Establishment Of The Right To Travel, Owen Meyer

Student Research

In 1999, the Supreme Court heard a case that, at the time, was viewed as inconsequential. Saenz v. Roe began as a welfare suit in the state of California, and, at its core, it is a case that tries the grounds on which the states can deny welfare benefits. The historical precedent goes beyond welfare; the precedent touches on subjects of wealth, race, and sex. While the case itself had very little in the means of legal history, which forced the Court to make its decision not based on the law, but on making the ethical choice. The decision of …

Switching Hats In Med-Arb: The Ethical Choices Required To Protect Process Integrity, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, there is interest in the use of mixed-mode dispute resolution, including med-arb. Med-arb provides the opportunity for parties to reach their own agreements, while also guaranteeing a binding decision. However, because med-arb combines mediation and arbitration, it presents a variety of ethical challenges – to party self-determination, impartiality, confidentiality, and even fairness and process integrity. Relying primarily on the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators and the Code of Ethics for Arbitrators in Commercial Disputes, it becomes clear that some of these ethical challenges can be met through process choices – e.g., the use of two neutrals rather than …

Victim Impact: The Manson Murders And The Rise Of The Victims’ Rights Movement, Merrill W. Steeg

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Equal Injustice For All: High Quality Self-Representation Does Not Ensure A Matter Is “Fairly Heard”, Jona Goldschmidt

Seattle University Law Review Online

Self-represented litigants (SRLs) are generally less successful in court than parties with legal representation. Some access-to-justice programs view self-representation as a skill that can be taught and will lead to more success in case outcomes, but Jona Goldschmidt pushes back against this assumption. Goldschmidt argues that even high functioning, educated, and computer savvy SRLs are at a disadvantage in the courtroom when courts strictly enforce rules and do not offer reasonable accommodations.

In this Article, Goldschmidt evaluates three cases that illustrate expert SRLs’ challenges in the courtroom, and he argues that ridged rule enforcement and failure to accommodate lead to …

Telling The Story On Your Timesheets: A Fee Examiner's Tips For Creditors' Lawyers And Bankruptcy Estate Professionals, Nancy B. Rapoport

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This short (approx. 5,000 words) essay, which forms the basis of a keynote address to the Federal Bar Association that I’m doing next month, discusses how much of a lawyer’s embedded assumptions and cognitive errors can come across in something as simple as a time entry on a bill. So much can be revealed about how a lawyer views himself or herself in society and about the lawyer’s relationship with the client that it’s worth examining what we can find when we look at legal bills. One note, though: my writing style is informal and distinctive in that regard (especially …

Freedom Of Expression V. Social Responsibility On The Internet: Vivi Down Association V. Google, Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Natalina Stamile

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

The aim of the article is to reflect on Google’s social responsibility by analyzing a milestone court decision, Vivi Down Association v. Google, that took place in Italy, involving the posting of an offensive video clip on Google Video. It was a landmark decision because it refuted the assertion that the Internet knows no boundaries, that the Internet transcends national laws due to its international nature, and that Internet intermediaries, such as Google, are above the law. This case shows that when the legal authorities of a given country decide to assert their jurisdiction, Internet companies need to abide by …