Legal Ethics Forum

Is there a "canon" of legal ethics video clips?

This afternoon in my PR class, I am going to show the 60 Minutes story on Alton Logan, which is the best vehicle I have found for helping students appreciate the stakes of the confidentiality rule.  I do not show many videos in class (though "The Hammer" Shapiro TV ads help frame our discussion of lawyer advertising), but now I view the 12-minute Logan clip as a fixture of the course.  Are there any other video clips that PR teachers find especially useful for introducing students to the debates surrounding our core professional values?

Can the mayor waive privilege?

Interesting story out of San Francisco, where the mayor leaked a privileged legal memorandum from the City Attorney's office.  Who has the right to waive privilege?  And if that includes the mayor, is waiver proper only in certain ways and with certain intent?  It appears that the mayor was attempting to discourage a particular legislative initiative.

The ABA's 20/20 Commission

    The charge to the ABA's new 20/20 Commission is expansive. This is from the press release:

“Technological advances and globalization have changed our profession in ways not yet reflected in our ethics codes and regulatory structure.  Technologies such as e-mail, the Internet and smart phones are transforming the way we practice law and our relationships with clients, just as they have compressed our world and expanded international business opportunities for our clients.” said Lamm.

The ethics commission will review lawyer ethics rules and regulation across the United States in the context of a global legal services marketplace.

Its work will be guided by three simple principles:  protect the public, preserve core professional values, and maintain a strong, independent and self regulated profession.  “Reshaping the U.S. legal profession to better serve clients and lawyers in this evolving environment will require a clear vision of the future.  It will require 20/20 vision,” Lamm emphasized.

    What's excluded? Monetary policy. Perhaps. To get ready, I've been 

The lawyer's role in the first year curriculum

I take it as a very good sign for the direction of legal education that UC-Irvine's new law school is requiring its entering students to take an interdisciplinary course exploring the lawyer's role.  Here's the description:

Law 507A - Legal Profession I (2 units)
This course, which will be part of both semesters, is designed to prepare students to chart rewarding and responsible careers in law. Drawing from various disciplines, including economics, history, sociology, and psychology, we will teach students about the variety of practice settings in which lawyers work and the professional opportunities and challenges of each. Among the practice settings we will consider are small, medium, and large firms, prosecutors' offices, public defender organizations, corporate counsel offices, nonprofit advocacy groups, legal aid, and the judiciary. We will consider ethical dilemmas that lawyers confront in each of these settings and survey some of the law that governs lawyers and that is particularly salient in each practice type. We will convene panels of lawyers from each type of practice to talk about their work and careers, the pressures they face, how they resolve such dilemmas, and where they find satisfaction. Students will participate in role-playing exercises based on typical problems confronted in practice. The course will also address larger issues facing the profession as a whole – including the legal services market and its regulation, the distribution of legal services, the profession's demographics, social structure, and working conditions, and the implications of globalization for the profession.

I teach a required first-year course at St. Thomas titled "Foundations of Justice."  Here is the description:

This course introduces students to the foundational moral commitments shaping both the structure of our system of justice and the multiple roles of the lawyer in administering that system.  Each line of inquiry is explored through both Catholic texts and texts from other religious or philosophical traditions, and by examining the multiple roles of the lawyer – as advocate for powerless or powerful clients, as policy-maker, as judge, as voter, as community member, and as family member.  The course is designed to give students tools for discerning and articulating the moral dimension of legal practice, and to provide a common vocabulary for continued consideration of this dimension in the remainder of their law school courses.  

Our course, not surprisingly, has a religious emphasis that Irvine's lacks, but I think both courses represent an increasing awareness that students need to be equipped to think deeply about their professional roles in terms that transcend the Model Rules, and that draw insight from other fields regarding fundamental questions of justice, ethics, and even human nature.  And perhaps even more significantly, the courses reflect a recognition that these issues need to be placed squarely on students' radar screens from the beginning of law school.  I know that a few other schools do something like this, but I don't know how widespread this practice will become; it's easier for new schools to innovate with the first year curriculum, in part, no doubt, because no one's ox is being gored when we make space for a new approach.

North Carolina Central makes more good news

I'm always looking at how the legal profession excludes new entrants, and what purpose is served by the exclusion.  One of the fascinating law schools to watch is North Carolina Central, whose graduates pass the bar at such rates that it calls into question the conventional wisdom about what formal credentials should be required of entering law students.  NCC is also a engine of socio-economic and racial diversity in the profession.  So it's nice to hear that NCC has been named the best value law school by the National Jurist.  Details over at Paul Caron's tax prof blog. 

Welcome to Our Newest Co-Blogger, Professor Stephen Gillers

I am delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Gillers as our newest co-blogger.  (His first post appears below.)  As many readers of this blog know, Stephen is the author of numerous important books and articles on legal ethics, is a frequently quoted commentator on the legal profession, and has been a member of many significant bar committees, including the ABA's recently announced 20/20 Commission.  Stephen is the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at NYU Law School, where he teaches Regulation of Lawyers, Evidence, Media Law, and Law and Literature.

Of particular note is one of Stephen's lesser known accomplishments: he started blogging before the word "blog" was even invented.  This article suggests that he was posting interesting legal ethics commentary on a service called Counsel Connect back in the early 1990's.  I don't know if this qualifies Stephen as being one of the earliest law professor adopters of the medium, but we're delighted that he's decided to pick up the habit again by blogging with us.  Welcome Stephen!

The 10 Worst Cases in Lawyer Regulation: Nominations Please

    For a talk at an upcoming ethics conference at the University of Akron School of Law, I decided to write about the Ohio Supreme Court's Rancman opinion, which not only rejected litigation funding as champerty and maintenance, but used rather hostile language to do so and utterly failed to weigh the merits of the practice. Rancman is on my 10 Worst Cases list for the field of lawyer regulation. 

    The title of the talk is Waiting For Good Dough: Litigation Funding Comes To Law. 

     The criteria for membership on the 10 worst list are described below. Maybe you want to suggest additional criteria. Not every bad case gets this honor. Anyway, case nominations are accepted. (Footnotes omitted; if you want them let me know.)

Odds and ends (August 23, 2009)

Here's an article about James Moliterno, a PR prof who travels the globe, consulting on legal ethics.    . . . .    More legal ethics fall-out from the saga of Kwame Kilpatrick, the former mayor of Detroit.    . . . .     Here's an interesting story about the state bar of Virginia's efforts -- recently squelched -- to discipline a prosecutor who sent letters to jurors suggesting that they not speak to defense counsel before letting the prosecutor know.    . . . .     

Ninth Circuit holds that in-house lawyer had retaliatory discharge claim under Sarbanes-Oxley

Opinion here.  Story here.

Law professors on Professor Yoo and tenure

In the wake of the statement by the Dean of UC-Berkeley Law School, Christopher Edley, about whether the school will look into Professor Yoo's tenure, the New York Times collects views here (including from our own Brad Wendel), the UC-Berkeley law students discuss the issue here, and the Balkin blog discusses it here.