Via Orin Kerr at Volokh, the ethics arm of DOJ, known as the Office of Professional Responsibility, will reopen its investigation of the lawyering behind the warrantless surveillance.
UPDATE: Marty Lederman has interesting comments here. Lederman puts his finger on some of the fault lines running through the analyses of the OLC memos. First, critics of those memos sometimes split on the issue of whether the memos (1) said what the client wanted to hear even though the lawyer didn't believe it; or (2) provides an analysis the lawyer believed but which were not competent. The former is a violation of MR 2.1; the latter is a violation of 1.1 It's fair to say that in general a violation of 2.1 would be more serious, because the lawyer's intent is worse. My best guess is that the authors of the memos believed that their interpretations were legitimate interpretations. If you read what John Yoo said before, during, and after his work at the OLC, he presents a fairly consistent position. I'm not a specialist in that area of law, but it's also my guess that certain portions of those memos (e.g., the "failed state" argument regarding Afghanistan) can be attacked on competence grounds and other portions can't easily be attacked for that (e.g., the application of the Geneva Convention as was affirmed by the DC Circuit, even if later reversed by the Supreme Court). I think it would be very difficult, short of a smoking gun memo, to prove that any of those lawyers knowingly offered advice they disagreed with, in violation of MR 2.1. There is a comment to MR 2.1 suggesting that sometimes mere technical advice can be inadequate (a comment that seems quite pertinent to the OLC memos), but it's hard to imagine how one could be prosecuted for that standard -- if it is really an enforceable standard at all.
Second, Lederman touches on the unusual aspect of the OLC's role. It's hard to define the OLC's client and OLC's role. We know that the President is not bound by the OLC, but others in the Executive Branch may be under certain circumstances. That's not how most private counseling and advising works. I can't bind clients when I advise them. As I understand it, the OLC has delegated powers from the Attorney General to speak authoritatively (under certain conditions) for everyone in the Executive Branch but the President.
Third, how would one prove incompetence in this matter? In private practice, disciplinary charges for incompetence often involve egregious conduct such as missing statutes of limitation, total abandonment of the matter, and so on. In other words, the incompetence proves itself.
Fourth, what are the consequences of incompetence? What did it cause? Based upon my reading of the leaked materials, the point when the ball was really fumbled was when the President sided with Gonzales over Powell regarding the early memos (dealing with the application of the Geneva Convention).
Anyway, Lederman's post is full of food for thought and it well worth reading. For an article that is essentially a roadmap for how to discipline the authors of the torture memos, see this article by Kathleen Clark.