Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

7,946 Full-Text Articles 6,350 Authors 7,356,353 Downloads 212 Institutions

All Articles in Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Faceted Search

7,946 full-text articles. Page 69 of 189.

The Use Of Digital Millenium Copyright Act To Stifle Speech Through Non-Copyright Related Takedowns, Miller Freeman 2020 Seattle University School of Law

The Use Of Digital Millenium Copyright Act To Stifle Speech Through Non-Copyright Related Takedowns, Miller Freeman

Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provided new methods of protecting copyright in online media. These protections shift the normal judicial process that would stop the publication of infringing materials to private actors: the online platforms. As a result, online platforms receive notices of infringement and issue takedowns of allegedly copyrighted works without the judicial process which normally considers the purpose of the original notice of infringement. In at least one case, discussed in detail below, this has resulted in a notice and takedown against an individual for reasons not related to the purpose of …


The Government Lawyer As Activist: A Legal Ethics Analysis, Andrew Martin 2020 Dalhousie University Schulich School of Law

The Government Lawyer As Activist: A Legal Ethics Analysis, Andrew Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Can a lawyer and government employee represent the government in her professional life while being an activist in her personal life? There is a striking and seemingly irreducible clash, at least at the intuitive level, between the two roles – between representing the government on the one hand while at the same time lobbying it or litigating against it on the other. Government lawyers are nonetheless some of the more successful activists in recent Canadian history. This article analyzes whether this duality is problematic from a legal ethics perspective. The analysis is grounded in three case studies: disability rights activist …


Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr. 2020 University of Maine School of Law

Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr.

Maine Law Review

Among the inherent powers of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court is the power to regulate the officers of its courts. As the court explained in Board of Overseers of the Bar v. Lee, “each of the three co-equal branches of government has, without any express grant, the inherent right to accomplish all objects necessarily within the orbit of that department when not expressly allocated to, or limited by the existence of a similar power in, one of the other departments.” It is not surprising that the Supreme Judicial Court has for many years regulated, through formal disciplinary proceedings, the conduct …


The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau 2020 University of Maine School of Law

The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau

Maine Law Review

In 1989, the Maine Commission on Legal Needs was formed to study the civil legal needs of Maine's poor population and to develop a plan for meeting those needs. Similar projects have been undertaken in a number of other states and by the American Bar Association in recent years. Each study has revealed a significant unmet need among the poor for assistance with legal problems. There seems little doubt that the situation is serious and widespread. The difficulty lies in finding a solution. One proposal that has been advanced is mandatory pro bono, a program that would require attorneys to …


Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr. 2020 University of Maine School of Law

Hart Failure: The Supreme Judicial Court's Interpretation Of Nonjudicial Demeanor, Harold T. Kelly Jr.

Maine Law Review

Among the inherent powers of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court is the power to regulate the officers of its courts. As the court explained in Board of Overseers of the Bar v. Lee, “each of the three co-equal branches of government has, without any express grant, the inherent right to accomplish all objects necessarily within the orbit of that department when not expressly allocated to, or limited by the existence of a similar power in, one of the other departments.” It is not surprising that the Supreme Judicial Court has for many years regulated, through formal disciplinary proceedings, the conduct …


Foreword: Corporate Lawyers: Ethical And Practical Lawyering With Vanishing Gatekeeper Liability, Marc I. Steinberg 2020 SMU Dedman School of Law

Foreword: Corporate Lawyers: Ethical And Practical Lawyering With Vanishing Gatekeeper Liability, Marc I. Steinberg

Fordham Law Review

As the articles in this Colloquium illustrate, the role of the corporate lawyer—both as in-house and outside counsel—is instrumental in effectuating ethical lawyering, sound corporate governance practices, and law compliance. These timely contributions that are summarized at a later point in this Article comprise a valuable resource to assess the functions, obligations, and perceptions of the corporate attorney, as well as the public policy ramifications of counsel’s conduct.


Compliance Elites, Miriam H. Baer 2020 Brooklyn Law School

Compliance Elites, Miriam H. Baer

Fordham Law Review

As corporate compliance has expanded its influence, so too has the status of those who implement and oversee the firm’s compliance function. Chief compliance officers (CCOs), who are often (but not exclusively) lawyers by training, increasingly boast the types of resumes one associates with elite lawyers. In many ways, this is good news for compliance. There may, however, be several downsides to a strategy of relying so heavily on a cadre of compliance elites. The aim of this Article is to discuss one of these downsides. High-performing lawyers nurture a potent, yet underexplored, cognitive blind spot. Having performed extremely well …


Bad Agent, Good Citizen?, Claire Hill, Brett McDonnell, Aaron Stenz 2020 University of Minnesota Law School

Bad Agent, Good Citizen?, Claire Hill, Brett Mcdonnell, Aaron Stenz

Fordham Law Review

Analyses of agents’ behavior normally focus on whether an agent is a good agent or a bad agent— whether or not an agent is faithfully pursuing the interests of her principal. But we should also consider whether a lawyer acting as a good agent is also promoting the public interest (i.e., a good citizen) or not (i.e., a bad citizen). Similarly, we should ask whether lawyers acting as bad agents are also harming society, or whether they may actually be promoting the public interest even though they are not promoting their clients’ interests.


Value Creation By Transactional Associates, Cathy Hwang 2020 University of Utah

Value Creation By Transactional Associates, Cathy Hwang

Fordham Law Review

How do transactional associates add value to deals? Other scholars have characterized transactional lawyers as transaction cost engineers, regulatory arbitrageurs, and enterprise architects. But those words describe partners. Although most of the deal team is made up of associates—and the vast majority of deal lawyers begin and end their careers in law firms as associates—the literature has said little about the work of associates. This Article seeks to illuminate what transactional associates do and how they add value to deals. Building on literature in contract design and transactional lawyering, it argues that associates help to mitigate some of the shortcomings …


Economic Inequality, Access To Law, And Mandatory Arbitration Agreements: A Comment On The Standard Conception Of The Lawyer’S Role, Sung Hui Kim 2020 UCLA School of Law

Economic Inequality, Access To Law, And Mandatory Arbitration Agreements: A Comment On The Standard Conception Of The Lawyer’S Role, Sung Hui Kim

Fordham Law Review

This Article contends that these autonomy-based defenses of the standard conception cannot withstand the “economic inequality” objection. According to this objection, the moral worthiness of lawyering under the standard conception cannot be reconciled with a legal system that is so marred by gross economic inequality such that only the wealthy have access to lawyers. It can also not be reconciled with the fact that the wealthy routinely use lawyers to undermine the public interest and exploit others who cannot afford lawyers. After examining responses to the economic inequality objection, this Article concludes that these responses do not take seriously how …


Food In Prison: An Eighth Amendment Violation Or Permissible Punishment?, Natasha M. Clark 2020 University of South Dakota

Food In Prison: An Eighth Amendment Violation Or Permissible Punishment?, Natasha M. Clark

Honors Thesis

This piece analyzes aspects such as; Eighth Amendment provisions, penology, case law, privatization and monopoly, and food law, that play into the constitutionality of privatized prisons using food as punishment. Prisoners have protection from excessive bail and fines and from cruel and unusual punishment, as per the 8th Amendment; however, deprivations such as restricted diets and harm caused by them is only a valid violation if the prisoner can prove deliberate indifference. Privatization of the prison industry has led to reduced quality, choice, and diversity in areas such as food, which comes at a detrimental cost to prisoners. Serving …


Return Of The King: Corruption Backsliding In America, Pedro Gerson 2020 LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Return Of The King: Corruption Backsliding In America, Pedro Gerson

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The United States appears to be going through a crisis of corruption. However, it is hard to know whether this is a matter of appearance or if the country is at risk of high levels of corruption making a comeback. The Article applies the equilibrium model of corruptionthe leading social science account of how corruption operates-to the current U.S. system, and shows that the United States may indeed be backsliding. The potential for corruption to creep back up is due to more than the political moment. Rather, it is the result ofpolitics combined with the relatively powerless institutional controls for …


The Legal Scholar's Guide Book Reviews, Jamie Abrams 2020 American University Washington College of Law

The Legal Scholar's Guide Book Reviews, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Success in law school and in the legal profession often involves mastering and navigating the plethora of unwritten rules and norms that govern institutions and communities. Differences in access to those unwritten rules can privilege and advance some while disadvantaging others. A second-generation law student, for example, is far more likely to know about the professional value of law review than a first-generation law student. Law scholarship is particularly plagued by an insularity that can yield a problematic echo chamber within elite institutions and privileged communities. Thus, the more legal scholarship can be explicitly demystified, taught, and mentored, the more …


Gatekeepers, Cultural Captives, Or Knaves?: Corporate Lawyers Through Different Lenses, Donald C. Langevoort 2020 Georgetown University Law Center

Gatekeepers, Cultural Captives, Or Knaves?: Corporate Lawyers Through Different Lenses, Donald C. Langevoort

Fordham Law Review

Here, I simply want to move things forward in the study of the professional responsibility of corporate lawyers in two ways that are somewhat related. One is to push harder on consciousness by looking more closely at the lengthy continuum— not a binary yes/no—in the awareness of wrongdoing risk as heavily influenced by the “slippery slope.” That is a layman’s intuition put to use well beyond academic research: armchair philosophers have long understood that the road to hell is not only paved with good intentions but starts in small, often unconscious steps that gradually grow larger and harder to stop. …


Forming Start-Up Companies: Who’S My Client?, Nancy J. Moore 2020 Boston University School of Law

Forming Start-Up Companies: Who’S My Client?, Nancy J. Moore

Fordham Law Review

Consider the following scenario: three individuals—a magician, a baker, and a puppeteer—want to start a business that will run birthday parties for children. The magician will put up most of the money, the baker has extensive experience with children’s birthday parties, and the puppeteer, who has an MBA, will manage the business. They meet with a lawyer to help them form a company, including advising them on such issues as choice of entity and allocation of ownership and control. Before the lawyer agrees to the representation, she must ask herself: “who will I represent?”


Using General Counsel To Set The Tone For Work In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport 2020 William S. Boyd School of Law

Using General Counsel To Set The Tone For Work In Large Chapter 11 Cases, Nancy B. Rapoport

Fordham Law Review

This Essay suggests that one way for the general counsel to help bankruptcy professionals make better staffing and budget decisions is to communicate her values more clearly to those professionals at the beginning of the engagement. In her role as the chief legal officer, the general counsel needs to let the bankruptcy professionals in on her thought processes. How does she watch over her own attorneys’ decisions in other types of cases? What expenses does she consider reasonable? If she takes an active role in monitoring her bankruptcy professionals’ work, her values (assuming that they’re good values) will contribute to …


Chief Legal Officer 5.0, Omari Scott Simmons 2020 Wake Forest University School of Law

Chief Legal Officer 5.0, Omari Scott Simmons

Fordham Law Review

This Essay builds upon the business-lawyer value-creation literature by analyzing the contemporary CLO and argues for an enhanced CLO role. It emphasizes the sometimes ignored and underemphasized demand-side considerations involved in the provision of legal services. These demand- side considerations will help to predict the competencies and expanded skill sets CLOs will need to navigate the challenging contemporary business environment. Part I of this Essay discusses CLOs’ sophisticated purchasing competencies. It explores how CLOs have revolutionized legal service provision by addressing problems stemming from information asymmetries between the client corporation and external legal service providers. Part II examines how the …


Corporate Law As An Existential Project, David Yosifon 2020 Santa Clara University School of Law

Corporate Law As An Existential Project, David Yosifon

Fordham Law Review

This Essay proposes that corporate law in particular can be a potent resource for the formation of meaning in our minds and in our lives.


Getting In And Out Of The House: The Worlds Of In-House Counsel, Big Law, And Emerging Career Trajectories Of In-House Lawyers, Eli Wald 2020 University of Denver Sturm College of Law

Getting In And Out Of The House: The Worlds Of In-House Counsel, Big Law, And Emerging Career Trajectories Of In-House Lawyers, Eli Wald

Fordham Law Review

The traditional story of in-house counsel is of a transformation and triumph over “Big Law” in a zero-sum game for power, prestige, and money. That story, however, is inaccurate descriptively, prescriptively, and normatively. Descriptively, in-house lawyers were part of the legal elite dominating corporate counseling before large law firms first rose to power and prominence. In-house counsel then lost ground and the position of general counsel to Big Law lawyers between the 1940s and 1970s, only to mount an impressive comeback to elite status beginning in the 1970s. Yet the in-house comeback was not a simple power struggle with Big …


Geneva Statement On Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need For Course Correction, Roberto Andorno, Francoise Baylis, Marcy Darnovsky, Donna Dickenson, Hille Haker, Katie Hasson, Leah Lowthorp, George J. Annas, Catherine Bourgain, Katherine Drabiak, Sigrid Graumann, Katrin Grüber, Matthias Kaiser, David King, Regine Kollek, Calum MacKellar, Jing-Bao Nie, Osagie K. Obasogie, Mirriam Tyebally Fang, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer, Jana Zuscinova 2020 Boston University School of Law

Geneva Statement On Heritable Human Genome Editing: The Need For Course Correction, Roberto Andorno, Francoise Baylis, Marcy Darnovsky, Donna Dickenson, Hille Haker, Katie Hasson, Leah Lowthorp, George J. Annas, Catherine Bourgain, Katherine Drabiak, Sigrid Graumann, Katrin Grüber, Matthias Kaiser, David King, Regine Kollek, Calum Mackellar, Jing-Bao Nie, Osagie K. Obasogie, Mirriam Tyebally Fang, Gabriele Werner-Felmayer, Jana Zuscinova

Faculty Scholarship

As public interest advocates, policy experts, bioethicists, and scientists, we call for a course correction in public discussions about heritable human genome editing. Clarifying misrepresentations, centering societal consequences and concerns, and fostering public empowerment will support robust, global public engagement and meaningful deliberation about altering the genes of future generations.


Digital Commons powered by bepress