Clients demand bad legal advice when legal advice can favorably influence third-party conduct or attitudes even when it is wrong. Lawyers supply bad legal advice most readily when they are substantially immunized from accountability to the people it is intended to influence. Both demand and supply conditions for a flourishing market are in place in…
William H. Simon is a highly regarded law professor and legal theorist whose principal subjects include the legal profession. Much of his scholarship challenges conventional professional norms and practices. His most recent article targets lawyers, especially law professors, who advise clients and serve as expert witnesses. His basic premise is that some clients do not…
I fear that the diffuse and ad hominem tendencies of Bruce Green's reply will distract attention from the core issues I sought to discuss.First, I argued that issues of professional and academic integrity and accountability are raised when lawyers give advice with certain third-party effects under conditions of partial or complete secrecy. I proposed a…
Few commentators, outside of the practicing bar and the judiciary, find much to recommend in the modern system of professional regulation of lawyers. While the topic (to date) has attracted only a small share of scholarly attention, justifications for the traditional exclusive control exercised by the bar and judiciary over the practice of law have…
There was a moment around 1990 when it all seemed possible. Finally, there was a way for black lawyers with ambition, skill, and determination to escape the frustrating limitations that seemed destined to block their progress at large law firms which, although finally willing to hire them, seemed unwilling or unable to treat them as…
During their “golden era” in the 1950s and 1960s, large American law firms were segregated along religious and cultural lines between WASP and Jewish law firms. The rise and success of large law firms with distinctive religious and cultural identities is surprising because the large firm was purportedly a-religious and meritocratic...
In 1991, Galanter and Palay published Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm, which documented the regular and relentless growth of large U.S. law firms. The book advanced several structural and historical factors to explain these patterns, centering on the adoption of the promotion-to-partnership tournament. Systemic changes in the marketplace for corporate…
Warrantless surveillance, extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, torture. These are the most serious charges of extralegal conduct by the present administration--conduct which, in one form or another, Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales and their staffs have attempted to give the imprimatur of law. The charges are serious indeed. To them, lesser charges could be added (cronyism,…
In January 2007, Charles “Cully” Stimson gave an early morning interview on a local talk radio station in Washington, D.C. Stimson was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, and his subject was Guantánamo. After a few innocuous questions and answers, and a dig at Amnesty International, Stimson abruptly changed the subject. “I think…
The contemporary public interest legal movement is not far from that description, which Martin Luther King, Jr. once invoked to characterize the civil rights campaign of the 1960s. Most of this nation's leading public interest law organizations are now in midlife; they have grown substantially in size and influence since their formation beginning in the…
In 1991, Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay declared a “crisis” in the legal world. Their landmark book, Tournament of Lawyers, described how structural changes within the profession forced America's largest law firms to abandon professional norms in pursuit of ever growing profits. Galanter and Palay's arguments confirmed fears that the legal “golden age” of the…
In recent years, the proper role of comparative law in the jurisprudence of American courts has become a hotly debated and controversial topic. The question was brought to the forefront of the legal community's attention following a number of United States Supreme Court decisions, perhaps most notably in Atkins v. Virginia and Roper v. Simmons,…
