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Ethics

Legal Ethics Forum

Covering Legal Ethics

Post Frequency: 11.2/day

Last Entry: August 14, 2020 at 13:23:48

Bill Henderson: larger firms lurching toward new equilibrium?

Posted on May 12, 2009
Bill Henderson's latest piece -- on market readjustments by biglaw -- is cross-posted here and here.

Eat and Drink with Legal Ethics Professors

Posted on May 11, 2009
Here is the invitation from Professor Alberto Bernabe-Riefkohl: On behalf of the Professional Responsibility section of the AALS and The John Marshall Law School, I'm delighted to invite you to an informal dinner at this month's National Conference on Professional...

The Silliest Legal Ethics Rule?

Posted on May 10, 2009
Now taking nominations. Near the top of my list is the rule that malpractice claims are not assignable, a rule recently affirmed by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in a case showing how unsound the rule is (2009 WL 367219)...

Expose'! ABA Covers Up Lincoln's Zealous Representation!

Posted on May 10, 2009
A few months ago, the ABA Journal had a cover issue about Abraham Lincoln that included a number of anecdotes about Lincoln as a lawyer. I submitted the following letter, which was not published: To judge by the highly acclaimed...

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Another Urgent Request for Signatures

Posted on May 09, 2009
I was asked yesterday by Reprieve lawyers for a Declaration regarding their professional responsibilities in another Guantanamo case. The following is a hurried draft. Please let me know if you are willing to to sign on (and if you have...

Important development from Texas trial court judge in Charles Hood death penalty case

Posted on May 08, 2009
There's been an encouraging development about the death penalty imposed on Charles Hood by the state of Texas. (Nod to Clare Pastore, who teaches legal ethics at USC.) You may recall that the original trial judge -- the one who...

Daniel Markovits Responds to Alice Woolley

Posted on May 08, 2009
Alice Woolley recently offered a critique of Daniel Markovits's new book in two posts (here and here). Daniel Markovits has sent along this response: I am of course delighted and grateful that Alice Woolley is paying attention to A Modern...

Blown statute of limitations for possible discipline of Professor Yoo?

Posted on May 07, 2009
Wow. (Nod to Volokh) Perhaps the Pennsylvania bar will lack the ability to investigate and/or discipline Professor Yoo for his role in drafting the torture memos, because they have a four year statute of limitations. (Yoo is licensed in Pennsylvania.)...

Would Anyone Favor Excluding This?

Posted on May 07, 2009
From a story by Zusha Elinson of The Recorder: It was just eight years ago that then-Marvell general counsel Matthew Gloss, patent attorney Eric Janofsky and VP of engineering Kaushik Banerjee rang up Virginia Wei, an in-house lawyer for rival...

NYT: Criminal charges for OLC lawyers are not likely; referrals to state bars are likely

Posted on May 06, 2009
Story here. (nod to Volokh) We've been waiting for the DOJ report from its Office of Professional Responsibility. The NYT says that DOJ is unlikely to prosecute the lawyers criminally, but probably will refer the lawyers to the states bars...

Association of [California] Discipline Defense Counsel

Posted on May 06, 2009
Here's the new website for the Association of Discipline Defense Counsel -- which appears to be focused to California-based defense counsel.

Update: Correspondence with Dean Chemerinsky about his op-ed in the LA Times

Posted on May 06, 2009
In the comments to an earlier post, five legal ethics teachers (3 professors; 2 adjuncts, including me) concluded that Dean Chemerinsky erred in his recent LA Times op-ed. Chemerinsky was commenting on a southern California political race where one of...

Women lawyers rate bosses by gender, with surprising results.

Posted on May 06, 2009
Summary here; article here. Key graf: "Among female lawyers under 40 who thought gender matters, 58 percent said male supervisors give better direction, give more constructive criticism (56 percent) and are better at keeping confidential information private (64 percent)...

My Anxieties, at Least

Posted on May 05, 2009
I've enjoyed reading David McGowan's posts on the OLC memos, and I'm particularly grateful for his pointer to the Federalist Society debate, which I'm still digesting. On his main post below, on anxieties about the rule of law, David argues...

Is diversity really the enemy of community (more on Markovits)?

Posted on May 05, 2009
In the last chapter of his book Markovits argues that the moral worth lawyers obtain by recasting the vices of lying and cheating as the virtues of fidelity and effacement, requires that lawyers belong to a community strong enough to...

Is there more to this story?

Posted on May 04, 2009
A lawyer put in jail over night for (apparently) failing to record properly the court's direction in an order given to the judge to sign (here)...

Are law schools gaming the numbers (part 26)?

Posted on May 04, 2009
Interesting analysis here from Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog. It seems that some law schools opted not to disclose their graudates' employment rates so that they could avail themselves of the default value that would be factored into the rankings...

Markovits and the Immanent Rationality of the Law Governing Lawyers

Posted on May 02, 2009
I am reading for review Daniel Markovits' A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age. The book raises almost innumerable topics on which to blog; for starters I am intrigued by Markovits attempt to construct the immanent rationality...

At The Federalist Society

Posted on May 01, 2009
At the risk of channeling too much Stanley Fish (though there are worse things to do in a blog), I'm stealing the title of one of his essays to link to this debate on the OLC memos, hosted by the...

Sticker Shock

Posted on May 01, 2009
There's a fascinating brouhaha about whether Congressional staffers can testify about the meaning of legislation (well, fascinating to me), and amongst the filings is a fee statement showing that 2008 graduates are being billed at $460 an hour... I know...

Chemerinsky on Concealing a Client's Identity

Posted on May 01, 2009
Here's a great op-ed from UC Irvine Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky about a political race for Los Angeles city attorney. One of the candidates is refusing to disclose the identity of any of his former clients, citing confidentiality concerns. Dean...

Professor Tamanaha, the OLC, and the Rule of Law

Posted on May 01, 2009
In my earlier post on two anxieties of the law I dismissed as "hyperbole" the idea that the OLC memoranda threaten the rule of law. One might read that as suggesting that Brian Tamanaha's rule of law concerns, to which...

The Legal Ethics of Online Investigations

Posted on April 30, 2009
I posted a link yesterday to a story about the ethics of using misleading tactics to gain access to quasi-private Facebook information. Today, the ABA eJournal posted this story about a Fordham Law School professor who asked his class to...

Character & Fitness in Action

Posted on April 30, 2009
Sometime in the mid-1970s, the deans of New York law schools were summoned to a meeting with the leadership of the N.Y. Character and Fitness Committee. The agenda was a proposal to enhance the exclusionary powers of the committee. At...

Conjectures About the OLC Memos and Two Anxieties of the Law

Posted on April 30, 2009
Two anxieties seem to me to suffuse much discussion of OLC memoranda concerning abusive treatment of prisoners. One anxiety is whether professional competence should be a defense to moral criticism. Another is whether there is such a thing as an...

Three Reasons to Favor Inquiry Into the OLC Memoranda

Posted on April 30, 2009
1. Fairness to the lawyers involved. Some but not all work product has been released and the actions of the relevant lawyers have been debated, with much critical discussion. It would be fair to free them from constraints of privilege...

The OLC Memos and the Move to Motive

Posted on April 29, 2009
Writing at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha raises some interesting points about the factual premises of recently released OLC memos. (See this and this.) His basic arguments are: (1) OLC lawyers could not have relied in good faith on the representations of...

ABA National Conference on Professional Responsibility (May 27-30, in Chicago)

Posted on April 29, 2009
The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility invites you to attend the 35th National Conference on Professional Responsibility. The Conference will be held on May 27-30. 2009, at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago, IL and the schedule is here. The Conference...

Survey of General Counsel on Billable Hours

Posted on April 29, 2009
Here's the story.

Legal Ethics and Facebook

Posted on April 29, 2009
The Philadelphia Bar Association's Professional Guidance Committee recently issued an opinion concerning a lawyer's proposed investigation of a witness's Facebook page. The lawyer wanted to ask a third person -- someone whom the witness would not recognize -- to send...

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