Legal Ethics Forum

Linklater's joins £1 billion club

Linklaters has joined Clifford Chance and Freshfields in that club.

A big week for Spector's former lawyer

Southwestern Law professor Jim Fischer and San Diego lawyer David Cameron Carr are predicting that Phil Spector's former lawyer, Sara Caplan, will not prevail on her appeal and will be ordered to testify to the detriment of her former client.  What happens next is anyone's guess.

Odd disclaimer

This may be unnecessary, but I wanted to say that I'm not the "John Steele" who emailed Instapundit to make a snarky comment about the NYT.  There's lots of us John Steele's out there.

Legal ethics in London?

Have any suggestions for a legal ethicist's "busman's holiday" in London?  I thought I might have a glass of port at Lord Brougham's grave and recite "an advocate, in the discharge of his duty . . . .," but as it turns out, Brougham has the good sense to spend his summers (and other seasons) in the French Riviera.

Odds and Ends (7/5/07)

Are you searching for innovative Rambo tactics to take out the opposition?  See if your client can purchase the opposing lawyer's mortgages.  That should provide you some leverage.  But be prepared to pay a steep price.    . . . .    We're going to see more of these disputes between biglaw firms and their aging partners.    . . . .    Too bad the 8-page decision in EEOC v. Hora, Inc., discussed behind a reg wall here, is unpublished.  The trial court had DQ'd the plaintiff's lawyer for manipulating an "informational mole" at the defendant, but the Third Circuit reversed, holding that the no-contact rule did not bar the lawyer's conduct.

Worse than the 54 Million Dollar Pants?

A recent bar examinee in Massachusetts failed the test and sued the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners.  The reason?  He refused to answer a question that would have forced him to acknowledge the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's opinion in Goodridge, the decision that granted same-sex couples the right to marry.  The plaintiff claims that the question required him to "affirmatively accept, support and promote homosexual marriage and homosexual parenting."  He says that the defendants violated his constitutional rights, and he seeks an injunction to prevent the use of the question in the future.  He also wants the Bar to toss out the question in connection with the grading of his own exam. 

And that's not all!  He also sued the Supreme Judicial Court and four individual justices, claiming that they infringed on his rights as well.  Here's the story.

Is it just me, or did the bar exam serve a useful purpose in excluding this particular applicant?

President Bush and Commutation: An Insider's View

One of our faculty members had something to share and gave me permission to post this, which is slightly off topic, but I had to post it. It's just sort of breath-taking:

>From: Timothy W. Floyd [[email protected]]
>Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 9:46 PM
>To: 'Law Faculty'
>Subject: President Bush and commutation
>
>In March 2003, for the first and only time in my life, I went to the West
>Wing of the White House. At that time, I was representing a man who was
>scheduled to be executed by the federal government in less than three weeks.
>I had filed a request for commutation, asking the President to commute the
>death sentence to a sentence of life without the possibility of release.
>Department of Justice rules require that such a request be filed with the
>Office of the Pardon Attorney in DOJ. Although I had filed the request in
>December, we had not yet received any response.
>
>While the commutation request was pending, I asked then White House Counsel
>Alberto Gonzales if he would meet with me to discuss the case. (I knew that
>the White House Counsel was ultimately responsible for making a
>recommendation to the President on my request.) To my great surprise, he
>agreed and invited me to a meeting in his office. We met for over an hour.
>I was allowed to present my argument in some detail, and I answered many
>questions from Judge Gonzales. I was quite impressed that Judge Gonzales
>had obviously read my written submissions and had already given the case
>some thought.
>
>Judge Gonzales told me three things about President Bush's policy in
>considering requests for commutation. First, that President Bush would not
>consider commutation if he believed that the case had already received full
>and fair consideration by the jury and the courts who heard the case.
>Second, that the President would not consider the request until he had a
>recommendation from the Department of Justice. Finally, he said that the
>President would not act on any request for commutation until all judicial
>avenues in the case had been exhausted.
>
>Just thought you might be interested in what this White House claimed about
>the commutation process.
>
>Tim

Timothy W. Floyd
Professor of Law and Director, Law and Public Service Program
Mercer University Walter F. George School of Law
1021 Georgia Avenue
Macon, Georgia 31207-0001
telephone: 478-301-2631
fax: 478-310-2259
[email protected]

The Field Code and the Canton of Geneva

I have always heard that California's confidentiality statute, Bus. & Prof. Code Sec. 6068(e), traces to the original Field Code of Civil Procedure, which, in Section 511 (later CA Section 282), takes the language from the lawyer's oath of the Canton of Geneva.  I finally got around to reading the report on the Field Code.  It reprints the Geneva Oath, which does not have the Section 6068(e) language.  (For those with office copies, it's page 205 of the report, also available to subscribers here at the wonderful heinonline.)  Does anyone know of any history explaining why the NY Commission added a section on secrecy, and where the language came from?

DM