Legal Ethics Stories
Authors:
Rhode, Deborah L. / Luban, David
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2005
14 chapters
have results for ethics
Introduction 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 4. Finally, “legal ethics” often denotes the formal ethics rules of the bar. The American Bar Association began to codify ethics rules in 1908, and produced three generations of rules, the Canons of Professional Ethics (1908), the Code of Professional Responsibility (1969), and the Rules of Professional Conduct (1983). The names themselves indicate a gradual shift in regulatory philosophy, from the hortatory and moralistic to the black-letter regulation of conduct. With the addition of the (2000), the legal subject of legal ethics completed a century-long process of turning a subject with moral overtones into a technical field of law. This transformation has two obvious advantages. First, it no longer assumes a consensus on ethical norms, and therefore better accommodates a legal profession far more diverse than the overwhelmingly white, male, Protestant, east-coast bar of a century ago, which often mistook its own biases for first principles of ethics. ...ethics into... ...ethics”...
- None of the legal ethics stories told here takes the legalization of ethics as its explicit theme—but the underpinning of enforceable legal obligations that structure legal ethics is present in each of them. Furthermore, once legal ethics gets recognized as a branch of law, it inevitably interacts with other branches of law: with contract and partnership law in Chapter 2; with tax law in Chapter 3; with constitutional law in Chapter 4; with anti-discrimination law in Chapter 8; with bankruptcy law in Chapter 7; and with disability-rights law in Chapter 9.
- Legal ethics is not a single subject. In fact, the term “legal ethics” refers to at least four distinct, though overlapping, topics.
- These, then, are the four principal strands of legal ethics: one might call them the Ethics of Honesty, the Ethics of Professionalism, the Ethics of Role, and Ethics as Hard Law. But of course, lawyers are not simply disembodied occupants of professional roles. The legal profession is a cross-section of society. It consists of people with identities of their own, quite apart from whatever professional identity they have. In Chapter 1, David Wilkins examines a famous case that pitted an African–American lawyer’s professional convictions against his racial identity, when, as an ACLU volunteer, he was asked to represent a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. So too, the legal profession faces the same issues of gender and racial diversity, of glass ceilings and real or imagined discrimination, as the society at large. In Chapter 8, Deborah L. Rhode examines the first sex discrimination case against any law firm or professional organization, Nancy Ezold’s suit against Wolf, Block, Schorr...
- For an analysis of the contingency fee as “litigation insurance,” see David Luban, Speculating on Justice: The Ethics and Jurisprudence of Contingency Fees, in Legal Ethics and Legal Practice: Contemporary Issues 109–112 (Stephen Parker & Charles Sampford eds., Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Chapter 2. Bohatch v. Butler & Binion: The Ethics of Partners 26 results (showing 5 best matches)
- From an ethics standpoint, it’s a loss, but on the contract a win. As far as the long-term effects of the case, the ethics thing was disappointing, but I still think that you have to get a decision from the court. That’s what they’re paid for, to make decisions in hard cases. I don’t like the decision but I wanted to make them make the decision.
- For Colette Bohatch, her case was always about ethics, namely her ethical obligation to report the senior partner at Butler & Binion who was overbilling their client Pennzoil. Her belief that she was doing the right thing sustained her for eight years, from the time she reported John McDonald to her law firm’s managing partner in July 1990 until the Texas Supreme Court decided her case in January 1998. Dissenting Justice Rose Spector agreed that Bohatch’s case concerned ethics. Her dissent held that partners violate their fiduciary duty when they punish compliance with the ethics rules and that Butler was liable to Bohatch for damages. The case’s moral lesson was summarized in the quotation from Huckleberry Finn that Spector placed in her dissent’s opening lines: “ ‘What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?’ ”
- Countiss Interview, supra note 107. See, e.g., Margaret Kline Kirkpatrick, Partners Dumping Partners: Business Before Ethics in Bohatch v. Butler & Binion, 83 Minn. L. Rev. 1767, 1798 (1999) (Court “should have created an exception to the employment-at-will rule for whistleblowing partners and associates on the basis of the public policy of encouraging ethics in the legal profession.”); Lindsay M. Oldham & Christine M. Whitledge, The Catch–22 of Model Rule 8.3, 15 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 881, 882 (2002) (explaining that striking the balance against whistleblowers leaves them without an incentive to report misconduct: “Currently, if a lawyer is fired for reporting misconduct, he will have little success in recovery through a suit for retaliatory discharge. Conversely, there is little to fear for a failure to report misconduct.”).
- Each side sought a clear solution, one upholding ethics and the other protecting partners. The court favored partnership over ethics when it ruled that the partners of Butler & Binion owed Bohatch no fiduciary
- Throughout the Bohatch case, the attempts to balance the demands of ethics against the duties of partners provoked conflicting and sometimes confusing arguments about ethics, partnerships, wrongful discharge, breach of fiduciary duty, and breach of contract. Although the ethical issues present in Bohatch—overbilling and the attorney’s obligation to report misconduct—are significant and recurring problems in the legal profession, in the final decision they were trumped by partnership law. The specific lesson of Bohatch—that whistleblowers may pay a personal or professional price for their decisions to report misconduct—illustrates a broader question that plagues the law of lawyering, i.e., to what extent can the practice of law accommodate the individual lawyer’s morality?
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Chapter 6. Spaulding v. Zimmerman: Confidentiality and its Exceptions 28 results (showing 5 best matches)
- These situations have two common features: human life is at risk and, under current state ethics codes, disclosure is generally not permitted. Should ethics rules permit disclosure in these and other situations in which the lawyer knows that death or physical harm is likely to result unless the lawyer discloses the threat?
- to discuss ethics rules or moral principles while stating that the defense lawyers acted in “good faith,” presumably meaning that they were not morally accountable because they were only doing their job under the adversary system. The Minnesota Supreme Court stated no view on the law and ethics of the lawyering involved, other than the ambiguous statement that “no canon of ethics or legal obligation
- One perennial problem, evident in Spaulding and many other cases, is the general unwillingness of judges to engage in candid discussion of ethics rules and their moral component. In Spaulding neither the trial judge nor the appellate court discussed the relevant ethics rules or considered their moral dimension. Nor were they willing to criticize the conduct of any of the lawyers involved, other than an implicit criticism of Roberts for his failure to discover the medical report. Most judges are former trial lawyers and identify with the difficulties of the role. In Spaulding the trial judge, elevated to the state supreme court at the time of the appeal, had an additional inhibition: a professional acquaintance with the defense lawyers. The unwillingness of courts to discuss and enforce the constraints of ethics rules, especially when it would involve criticism of the conduct of specific lawyers, is a continuing and important form of professional failure.
- the ethics and procedural rules in effect in 1957, in Minnesota or elsewhere in the United States, did not require (and probably prohibited) the defense lawyers, without their clients’ consent, from disclosing Spaulding’s life-threatening condition to him. And third, under the ethics and procedural rules in effect in nearly all states today, the defense attorneys’ obligations (or non-obligations) to Spaulding are the same.
- highlights several important aspects of the law and ethics of lawyering: First, the unwillingness of lawyers, judges and the organized profession to talk openly and seriously about the situations in which threats of harm to third persons justify a breach of the lawyer’s most sacred duty, that of confidentiality to client. Second, the reality, , for example, the reality that defense counsel is selected, directed and paid by the liability insurer creates a risk that defense counsel may ignore the insured, deferring to the economic interest of the insurer, who controls repeat business. And finally, the truth that the duties and obligations of lawyers often find more concrete expression in procedural and other law applicable to a particular situation than they do in the profession’s codes of legal ethics.
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Contributors 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Legal Ethics
- is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches courses on legal ethics, the legal profession, and ethical issues in corporate representation. He is the author of
- is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and Director of the Stanford Center on Ethics. She is the former Director of the Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession at Stanford University School of Law; the former chair of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession and the former president of the Association of American Law Schools. She also served as senior counsel to the Minority members of the Judiciary Committee, the United States House of Representatives, on presidential impeachment issues. She has received the American Bar Foundation’s W. M. Keck Foundation Award for Distinguished Scholarship on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility, and the American Bar Association’s Pro Bono Publico Award for her work on expanding public service opportunities in law schools. Professor Rhode graduated Phi Beta Kappa and ...on Women and Gender and writes primarily in the area of legal ethics and gender discrimination. She is the author or...
- holds the Larry & Joanne Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, where she teaches professional responsibility, constitutional law and torts. She has written about whistleblowers in , 33:1 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 160 (Spring 2005) and , 14 ¢?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 259 (2001). She was formerly Assistant Counsel in the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
- Legal Ethics Stories
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- John M. Darley, How Organizations Socialize Individuals into Evildoing, in Codes of Conduct: Behavioral Research into Business Ethics 13, 25 (David M. Messick & Ann E. Tenbrunsel eds. 1996).
- Exploring this story requires appreciating that corporate transactional lawyers tend to have a distinctive approach to conflicts issues. Legal ethics rules provide that lawyers may not simultaneously represent clients with actual or potential conflicts of interest unless the lawyer reasonably believes that he will be able to represent both interests adequately, and each client consents to representation by waiving objection to the lawyer’s conflict.
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Legal Ethics Stories 3 results
Title Page 1 result
Chapter 1. Race, Ethics, and the First Amendment: Should a Black Lawyer Represent the Ku Klux Klan? 2 results
- NAACP officials might offer two distinct justifications for their decision to terminate Griffin from his post as General Counsel. The first is purely substantive: it was morally wrong for Griffin to represent the Klan and therefore he is not fit to be a member of the NAACP. The second sounds in process and professional ethics: it was wrong for Griffin to represent the Klan
- For example, Griffin’s case demonstrates that notwithstanding their familiar shortcomings, carefully crafted professional rules could provide limited, but nevertheless important, guidance. Thus, even if First Amendment considerations counsel against preventing lawyers from talking to the press, the rules of professional conduct ought to make clear that a lawyer is under no obligation to follow the full-service public relations model of legal practice. Similarly, the ethics rules could distinguish between positional conflicts involving advocacy organizations and those relating to private clients, in much the same way as the solicitation rules distinguish between public interest lawyers and private practitioners in paid cases.
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Acknowledgments 3 results
- Some of the legal ethics stories contained in this book have been adapted from earlier publications.
- Race, Ethics, and the First Amendment: Should a Black Lawyer Represent the Ku Klux Klan
- , Vermont Law Review, vol. 24, Winter 2000, pp. 417-535, and Mello’s book The United States Versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber, Context Publications, 1999.
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Dedication 1 result
- Professor of Law, Vermont Law School. In the interest of space, I have not included footnotes in this chapter. Citations may be found in Michael Mello, The United States Versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber (1999); Michael.Mello, The Non–Trial of the Century: Representation of the Unabomber, 24 Vermont Law Review 417 (2000).
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- There was also a lurking UPL/ethics problem with my ghostwriting the answer to the petition. A number of courts have ruled that lawyers may not help pro se litigants draft pleadings and briefs without disclosing that fact to the court.
- See, e.g., Middlesex County Ethics Comm. v. Garden State Bar Ass’n, 457 U.S. 423, 43637 (1982); Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971). Adding to the complexity of the procedural tangle facing us, the ordinary rules governing abstention apply with greater force to bar matters, and it is clear that we were obligated to raise our constitutional defenses in the state proceeding or risk waiving them. See D.C. Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983); Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 415, 416 (1923). Indeed, the “Rooker–Feldman doctrine” acts to keep cases challenging the activities of state bar associations out of federal court, which solidifies the power of states to regulate the practice of law without significant federal constitutional oversight.
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Chapter 10. Greed On Trial 1 result
- ...fee in the tobacco litigation. And that litigation paid off hugely. In 1998 a master settlement agreement (MSA) between forty-six states and Big Tobacco awarded Massachusetts $8.3 billion over twenty-five years, in purported Medicaid losses resulting from smoking. The tobacco companies also agreed to pay the states’ legal fees, in many cases relying on an arbitration panel to decide how much each legal team deserved. As the lead law firm for the Commonwealth, Brown Rudnick hit the jackpot. Having invested about $10 million in time and expenses, it won $178 million from the panel, which awarded Massachusetts, of all the states covered by the MSA, the highest legal fees—$775 million in all. In court the state noted that Brown Rudnick’s chief of litigation, Frederick Pritzker (also the chairman of its ethics committee), had siphoned off $14 million for seventy hours of work: a rate of $200,000 per hour. Sobol, the lead lawyer, received $13 million. On paper each Brown...
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- Publication Date: October 7th, 2005
- ISBN: 9781587789359
- Subject: Professional Responsibility/Ethics
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: Rhode and Luban’s Legal Ethics Stories serves as a reminder that ultimately law is about human beings, not doctrines or even cases, because the human lives it addresses are real and vivid. The stories typify issues that most lawyers confront in one form or other at some time in their careers. This collection of 10 significant ethics rulings reveals the rich background surrounding salient cases on issues of: Race Gender Class Taxation Bankruptcy Defense representation Confidentiality Practicing with law partners Greed The story behind each case provides a look into its immediate impact as well as its continuing importance in shaping the law.