Legal Ethics Stories
Authors:
Rhode, Deborah L. / Luban, David
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2005
18 chapters
have results for Legal Ethics Stories
Introduction 36 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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 Stories
- 1. As countless lawyer jokes testify, for most people legal ethics has to do with untruthfulness and greed. Unethical lawyers are those who lie to clients and courts, or cheat their clients and adversaries. Two chapters in
- Going beneath the cases to the stories is especially important in legal ethics. Legal ethics, unlike subjects such as constitutional law, is not organized around landmark decisions. There are practical reasons why this is so. The rules of legal ethics have always been underenforced by the courts, and as a result the jurisprudence is sparse compared with other areas of law. Underenforcement arises from structural facts about law practice and professional discipline. A great deal of what goes on between lawyers and clients is shielded by the attorney-client privilege and the ethical duty of confidentiality, and never sees the light of day. Clients and adversaries often have no idea when a lawyer has misbehaved, ...is willing to blow the whistle. Chapter 2 of this book tells the story of one such whistle-blower, Colette Bohatch Mele, and paints a vivid picture of the daunting obstacles a conscientious lawyer can face. Even when the facts of lawyer misbehavior come to light, victims...
- 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. Second, turning legal ethics...
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Legal Ethics Stories 5 results
- LEGAL ETHICS STORIES
- Chapter 1. Race, Ethics, and the First Amendment: Should a Black Lawyer Represent the Ku Klux Klan?
- Chapter 2. Bohatch v. Butler & Binion: The Ethics of Partners
- Chapter 8. “What’s Sex Got to Do With It?”: Diversity in the Legal Profession
- Chapter 9. In Re Arons: The Plight of the “Unrich” in Obtaining Legal Services
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Title Page 1 result
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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Contributors 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Legal Ethics Stories
- 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
- , Professor of Law at Vermont Law School, teaches capital punishment, legal ethics, constitutional criminal procedure, and criminal law. He has published five books on capital punishment, including
- 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 ...and received her legal training from Yale Law School. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, she joined...
- Legal Ethics
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Chapter 9. In Re Arons: The Plight of the “Unrich” in Obtaining Legal Services 47 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , however, is not only Marilyn Arons’ story. It is also the story of the organized bar and its adherence to arcane rules forbidding non-lawyers from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law. These rules are not simply outdated. At times, demonstrates, they are barriers to justice, denying millions of Americans access to the legal system.
- 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. These decisions place public interest and legal services lawyers in a bind. There are untold occasions where a lawyer might have time to help a pro se litigant draft a brief or other legal document, but cannot handle the case in its entirety. Once a lawyer reveals his or her behind-the-scenes participation in a case, however, there is a real risk that the court may order the lawyer to assume responsibility for the case. Making matters worse, public interest lawyers often ghostwrite papers for filings in jurisdictions in which they are not admitted. A disclosure requirement might subject them to charges that
- On the other hand, a hearing held several advantages. Mrs. Arons could tell her story, in her own words, from her own perspective, in a voice we could not hope to capture on paper and could not embody in a stipulation. A hearing would also give the parents an opportunity to tell their stories, which were so poignant and compelling that anyone hearing them would be moved by their plight. And we thought that the publicity that would flow from a hearing would help convince the hearing panel and the public that our cause was just.
- This marks a dramatic—even seismic—shift in the nature of legal work performed by lawyers. Three decades ago, only about one-quarter of the lawyers in private practice worked for corporate law firms. existed for decades; namely, that for many Americans legal services are generally unavailable, not by reason of poverty (because most of these people are not poor) but simply because they are not sufficiently wealthy to afford the high cost of legal services. We’ll call these people the “unrich.” Indeed, many Americans cannot afford anything but the most routine legal services (e.g., the preparation of a will). The poor, unless they are among the lucky few who receive free legal services, are denied access to the legal system altogether.
- Fact number four underscores the significance of fact number three: According to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) and the American Bar Association (ABA), most Americans (60%–70%) cannot afford to have their legal needs addressed by lawyers. Take the poor first. The LSC estimates that fifty million Americans (out of about 280 million) live in households that are nominally eligible for free legal services. The qualifier “nominally” is necessary, because the resources of the LSC and other providers of free or low-cost legal services have been spread so thin that these lawyers can take only a fraction of worthy cases brought to them by eligible clients. Remember, these people are too poor to hire lawyers. As a result, the LSC estimates that between 80% and 90% of the legal needs of the poor go unmet. ...accelerating, along with the reduction of funding for legal services programs. And the private bar has not shouldered much of the burden; estimates suggest that fewer than 20% of...
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Chapter 2. Bohatch v. Butler & Binion: The Ethics of Partners 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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.”).
- It was gradually becoming apparent that the ethics issue had no legal home; this whistleblower could find no remedy in whistleblower law.
- Larry & Joanne Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics, University of Houston Law Center, lgriffin@uh.edu.
- 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?
- 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.
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Chapter 6. Spaulding v. Zimmerman: Confidentiality and its Exceptions 43 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The many changes made in the ABA Model Rules in 2002–2003 have led a great many states to reconsider their ethics codes. There are hopeful signs that on this and other issues the central moral tradition of the legal profession will be affirmed, and disclosure will be permitted or required when a client has used the lawyer’s services in perpetrating a crime or fraud on a third person or a tribunal.
- See, e.g., Monroe H. Freedman, Understanding Legal Ethics (1990). Freedman’s argument for nearly absolute confidentiality also relies on the special constitutional protections afforded criminal defendants.
- 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
- The lawyer-client relationship is a joint endeavor that normally involves a legal and moral dialogue in which client and lawyer learn from one another. The ethics rules require the lawyer to inform the client of alternative courses of action (Rule 1.4(a)(1)), and to defer to the client’s choice of a lawful objective (Rule 1.2(a)). The rules require the lawyer to give “candid advice” and “exercise independent judgment,” and permit the lawyer to include moral and other considerations in that advice (Rule 2.1).
- 15 U.S.C. § 7201 et seq. See Roger C. Cramton, George M. Cohen & Susan P. Koniak, The Legal and Ethical Duties of Lawyers After Sarbanes–Oxley, 40 Villanova L. Rev. 260 (2004) [hereinafter “Duties After Sarbanes–Oxley”] (discussing up-the-corporate ladder reporting of material violations of law, permissive “reporting out,” and other questions raised by current ethics rules and the adopted and proposed rules of the SEC implementing § 307 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act)
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Dedication 1 result
Chapter 7. Bankrupt in Milwaukee: A Cautionary Tale 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- 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.
- 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).
- Nonetheless, Gellene’s tendency to engage in petty transgressions may have left him at risk to commit more egregious ones. Research indicates that moral behavior to some degree is a matter of habit. The ways people routinely approach and react to circumstances shape them in subtle ways over time, much as continuous incremental changes in the course of a river can eventually shift its course. Gellene’s willingness to cut corners on occasion may have eroded some of his resistance to dishonesty. This erosion may have left him without adequate ethical resources to withstand temptation in the Bucyrus case. Gellene’s character thus is a part of the story, but it’s not the whole story. That requires more attention to the organizational setting in which he worked: the modern large law firm.
- The evidence suggests, however, that the story is more complicated than either account implies. Attributing blame solely to flawed individuals or corrupt organizations rarely captures the subtleties of how ethical misconduct occurs. Furthermore, it offers false reassurance that only moral deviants, not ordinary people, engage in such behavior. A striking amount of wrongdoing can occur in settings populated by people who are generally decent and well-intentioned. Complex features of individual and social psychology can interact in ways that can’t always be anticipated.
- In the case of John Gellene, there is enough information to sketch out at least the outlines of a plausible explanation that is more complex than the prevailing views. This explanation acknowledges the role of Gellene’s personality and character, but also takes into account crucial features of modern large law firm practice. Some of these factors motivated Gellene’s behavior, while others helped him rationalize it. John Gellene, in other words, was the protagonist in several different stories, whose intersection combined to send him to jail.
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Chapter 4. In the Pink Room 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- ...two legal burdens. He had to persuade the courts, first, that the prosecutor had the documents that Anthony Judge had discovered in the HRA files; and second, that there was some likelihood that if the defense had been given the documents, the verdict would have been different. This second burden is particularly thorny. It requires the courts to reconstruct a past event (the trial), that was itself an attempt to reconstruct a past event (the alleged crime), in order to determine the effect that the missing information would have had on the jury’s view of the prosecutor’s proof of that crime. Through witnesses and documents, and subject to the rules of evidence, juries get information about the past. Always, that information is incomplete. Gaps are inevitable. Also, some of the evidence may be contradictory because witnesses honestly perceive or remember differently. Sometimes witnesses lie. It is the jury’s job to decide which purported facts are true. Lawyers want juries...
- This might have ended the story except for Anthony Judge. In the course of his investigation, Judge discovered documents in HRA files that were not given to Ramos and that led Judge to believe that Ramos was innocent. “I was astounded to read what I read,” Judge would tell the But Judge was not free to give the documents to Ramos without an agreement from the firm’s clients. They did agree, and Judge gave the documents to Flor Cupelis, Ramos’s mother. Of course, the documents were of no use without a lawyer to interpret them and evaluate whether they might provide a legal basis for challenging Ramos’s conviction. By this time, 1991, Ramos had been in prison nearly six years. Cupelis told her son what Judge had given her. He told her whom to call.
- In affirming Justice Collins two years later, the appellate court also explained how the withheld documents could have enabled Ramos to offer the jury a different explanation—to tell a different story—from the one the prosecutor argued in summation:
- Dismissal of the indictment does not end the story. It has one final chapter. Before turning to it, though, a side note that appears in no court opinion: Two days after the indictment was dismissed, the press reported that when O. was eight years old, she claimed that she had been snatched and raped by a “tall man” while on her way to the store. As she had initially testified at Ramos’s trial, O. said that both she and the man were standing. A medical examination disproved her claim and she recanted. “She said her mother never believes anything she tells her,” a police officer said, adding that O. made up the story because she was afraid her mother would be angry that her clothes were soiled.
- Justice Collins’s opinion does not end the story however. The BDAO chose to appeal. It argued that Ramos had not in fact proved that the documents were in its files during the trial (as opposed to 1991) and that in any event they were not exculpatory. For example, responding to the evidence that O. had “plac[ed] dolls in intercourse positions with movements,” which Justice Collins wrote could have been used to show the child’s precocity about sex, the BDAO offered a reason why this information was not exculpatory: “By placing the dolls in close proximity she could have been simulating wrestling or some other activity.”
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Chapter 10. Greed On Trial 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- No, not exactly. Brown Rudnick and four other firms representing Massachusetts had secured a 25% contingency 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...
- They do. The plaintiffs’ final expert witness was another legal megaphone—a tall, strapping law professor named Charles Silver, of the University of Texas. The co-director of the university’s Center on Lawyers, Civil Justice, and the Media, Silver boasted of having advocated on behalf of the private lawyers in Texas who angled (unsuccessfully) for the $25 billion tobacco award. Silver was a card-carrying, University of Chicago-trained free-market guy: the price is what the market will bear, end of story. “I only know one tune,” Silver told Richlin during cross-examination. The line worked quite effectively in Richlin’s closing argument.
- lawyers’ strategy was to be very thorough and tedious,” the juror Craig Stevens, a mechanical engineer at the General Electric aircraft factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, told me. “It would take three, four, five days for a witness to tell his story, and then another witness told the same story all over again.”
- The question before the jurors was not whether legal fees amounting to $7,700 an hour were “unreasonable.” It was whether the lawyer-plaintiffs should get $1.3 billion more.
- amounted to an average of more than $7,700 an hour) reflected the state’s role as one of the key participants. In other states lawyers lifted their fingers to the wind of public opinion and eventually settled for the arbitration awards, which were by any reasonable standard gargantuan. (Lawyers in Texas ended up accepting “only” $3.3 billion. They had asked for $25 billion—more than the state’s settlement amount—but soon came around. The former Texas attorney general is in jail for trying to defraud the tobacco fund; but that, as they say, is another story.) Brown Rudnick and a co-plaintiff, the San Francisco partnership of Lieff Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, decided to sue for their full fees.
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Chapter 1. Race, Ethics, and the First Amendment: Should a Black Lawyer Represent the Ku Klux Klan? 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Griffin cannot be held responsible for all of the many uses to which others will seek to put his story. Nor is the fact that others may misuse one’s criticisms a sufficient ground for silencing dissent. Griffin can, however, try to avoid being used as a pawn for causes that ultimately disserve his broader commitment to the struggle for racial justice. Thus, even if he believes that the legal profession should be self-regulating, he should still remind his audience that honoring one man’s efforts is no substitute for developing a comprehensive program designed to meet the black community’s chronic legal needs. Similarly, even if he agrees that the NAACP has strayed too far from its roots, he should be careful not to convey the additional impression that the venerable organization is no longer an important voice that deserves attention and respect.
- 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.
- The problem is that this implicit message is false. Legal counsel is not widely available except to corporations in the Fortune 500 and individuals in the top income brackets. Most lawyers do little or no pro bono work and, as I have indicated, the bar’s record with respect to representing unpopular clients is spotty at best. The plight of poor blacks in the legal system is even bleaker. Blacks have less access to legal services than whites at the same time that they are disproportionately more likely to encounter threatening legal problems.
- Much of the rhetorical punch of the rights thesis comes from the widely shared view that in our system of justice everyone—no matter how reprehensible—is entitled to a lawyer. This consensus rests on a broad array of empirical and moral arguments that need not be restated here. Suffice it to say that most Americans believe that in our highly legalized society, it is fundamentally unfair to deprive people of their liberty or property without giving them an opportunity to present their side of the story in its best light.
- 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
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Chapter 8. “What’s Sex Got to Do With It?”: Diversity in the Legal Profession 30 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In the final analysis, most participants in the Ezold litigation believed that it had been worth the price. Unlike the typical discrimination plaintiff, Ezold felt that the experience had been “extremely positive” in terms of her career. Despite the financial costs, and the difficulties of “getting her life on track” during prolonged legal proceedings, the media exposure had steered many clients with similar stories in her direction, and she had carved out a profitable speciality in employment discrimination. case had no obvious payoff in client development. But it did advance her personal values and commitments. To her, the moral of the story is that lawyers who care about these issues, “just have to keep litigating them” until the profession truly changes and equal opportunity is not just an aspiration but an achievement.
- ruling cannot yet be assessed, the litigation experience does suggest some broader lessons about the capacities and limitations of law in discrimination cases. The most obvious moral of the story is that current legal doctrine and procedures are a highly imperfect means of addressing workplace bias. As many
- According to a coalition of fifty-five women’s rights and civil rights organizations, which filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the plaintiff, this was the classic story of a highly qualified woman who was denied promotion while comparably, or less-qualified men were granted promotion. It is Ms. Ezold’s individual story, and that of countless others who experience similar discrimination, that accounts for the “glass ceiling”—the vast statistical disparity between the number of women and minorities entering the work force and the number being promoted to its upper levels.
- So too, many leaders of the bar saw this case as a classic story of injustice, but one with different villains and victims. From their vantage point, this litigation was about a woman who could not meet a highly demanding partnership standard, could not believe that she was in any way lacking, and looked for someone else to blame. It was also a story
- regrets, but they also paid a substantial price. If there is any clear moral to the story, it is one on which reasonable readers can disagree.
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Chapter 3. Travails in Tax: KPMG and the Tax Shelter Controversy 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The KPMG story also illustrates the continued importance of the institutions of professionalism. Many of the principal players in the firm’s tax practice were lawyers who used their tax expertise outside the confines of traditional lawyer-client relationships. Although precise numbers are hard to come by, a growing number of law graduates are finding it advantageous to renounce law practice in favor of characterizing themselves as consultants or legal experts. In claiming that they are not practicing law, “law specialists” seek to sell their expertise outside the strictures of professional regulation. The KPMG saga signals some of the
- See U.S. Tax Shelter Industry: The Role of Accountants, Lawyers, and Financial Professionals, Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 108th Cong,. (First Session), November 18 and 20, 2003, Volumes I–IV. In addition to thousands of pages of documents, the subcommittee released a detailed report, Minority Staff Report of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, U.S. Tax Shelter Industry: The Role of Accountants, Lawyers, and Financial Professionals: Four KPMG Case Studies: FLIPS, OPIS, BLIPS, and SC2, reproduced in id. Vol.1 at 145 [“U.S. Tax Shelter Industry”]. For a description of the legal environment, the economic incentives driving the tax shelter market, and the role of promoters and outside legal advisers, see Joseph Bankman, The New Market for Tax Shelters, 83 Tax Notes 1775 (1999); see also Janet Novack & Laura Sanders, The Hustling of X–Rated Tax Shelters, Forbes (Dec. 14, 1998).
- , Legal Times, Sept. 6, 1999, at S42; Amy Boardman & Carrie Johnson, Accounting for Competition: As Tax Lawyers Jump to the Big Six, Rivalry Grows between Attorneys, Accountants, Legal Times, Feb, 3 1997 at 1; Big Five Court Tax Attorneys: Many Make Leap As Accounting Firms Work to Expand Their Legal Reach, Crain’s N.Y. Bus., March 22, 1999, at 13; Ernst & Young Scores Another Top Tax Lawyer, The Recorder, March 25 1999, at 1; Tax Report, Wall St. J., Feb. 2, 2000,
- KPMG’s story should cause managing partners at law firms to think twice before borrowing the accounting firm model.
- On an individual level, the KPMG story provides a lesson in the growth of self-knowledge and personal accountability. Hamersley insisted on maintaining his objectivity and managed to avoid the processes of group-think and self-rationalization that overcame his colleagues. On the occasions when he was asked to review dubious tax schemes, Hamersley did not hesitate to articulate his concerns. But his main goal after he became aware of the firm’s tax shelter activity was professional survival: As he describes it, his plan was to avoid direct involvement in the firm’s
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Chapter 5. United States v. Kaczynski: Representing the Unabomber 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- After each horror story—and all sixteen bombings were described—the Judge asked Kaczynski, “Do you agree with the factual representation just made by the Government’s attorney?”
- 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).
- published a story headlined
- described Kaczynski’s reaction: “The alleged Unabomber looked at the judge for an instant, and then began rapidly writing on his legal pads.” During the afternoon proceedings in open court, Kaczynski was “alternatively scribbling on his legal pads, shoving notes at his attorneys, or whispering animatedly at them. His brother, David, and mother, Wanda, attended the session. But Kaczynski did not look at them.”
- The first letter from the Unabomber arrived out of the blue. One morning in July, 1998, the letter just showed up in my Vermont Law School mailbox. It was in a white, legal-sized envelope, addressed to me, with Kaczynski’s name, prisoner number, and return address in the upper left-hand corner. My initial instinct was that the letter was a gag engineered by one of my friends from my days as a Florida capital public defender. Still, the envelope, and the letter it contained, seemed authentic. I recognized his cramped, painfully precise handwriting, and the envelope contained all the appropriate prison stamps, such as the prison mail room’s date stamp.
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Copyright Page 1 result
- Foundation Press, of Thomson/West, has created this publication to provide you with accurate and authoritative information concerning the subject matter covered. However, this publication was not necessarily prepared by persons licensed to practice law in a particular jurisdiction. Foundation Press is not engaged in rendering legal or other professional advice, and this publication is not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. If you require legal or other expert advice, you should seek the services of a competent attorney or other professional.
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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.
