Over at Conglomerate, they're discussing how the realtors (allegedly) used professional rules to set minimum prices. It was in the mid-1970s that the US Supreme Court ruled that legal ethics codes couldn't be used that way, and more recently the DOJ forced the ABA and AALS to enter a consent decree not to use law school accreditation to affect law professors' salaries. All those items confirm Adam Smith's famous observation:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
A press release says that legal ethics scholar Norman Spaulding will be leaving Boalt and joining Stanford, where he's been visiting. (Nod to Leiter Reports.)
The University of Wisconsin Law School's SBA now has a blog.
Renowned lawyer Lloyd Cutler passed away.
Christine Hurt, at Conglomerate, didn't like Adam Cohen's op-ed piece in the NYT about the need for a blogger's code of ethics. I didn't either. Enforceable ethics codes are necessary when a profession strikes a regulatory bargain with the state to exempt itself from other forms of legal control. The mainstream media don't have an enforceable ethics code, to my knowledge. Bloggers don't need one either. It would be nice, of course, if all mainstream journalists and bloggers displayed, in Lord Moulton's words, "obedience to the unenforceable." But, as many have observed, bloggers who want large audiences have plenty of incentives to be accurate and interesting.