Legal professionalism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025, Populism, Popular Sovereignty, and Public Reason

The concept of the dual state has recently been revisited by various scholars to shed light on the operation of state mechanism in current autocratic regimes. From Fraenkel's perspective, the idea of dual state presumes a two-winged state mechanism, which is based on the coexistence of 'normative' and 'prerogative' states. Besides the classical model on the legal regime of the Third Reich, it seems that it has become an excellent tool for the sustainability of current autocratic and populist polities. This paper will draw attention to the similarities on the political and legal anatomies of current cases and the German case of the 1930s. In doing so, it will place an emphasis on the changing character of contemporary prerogative states which are more subtle and complex, and therefore could be more hazardous for democratic ideals than their historical counterparts.

2025, Professional Liquidation in the Context of Autocratic Legalism: Lawyers, Class, and Status in Turkey, 2002-?

The relationship between law and autocratization is usually discussed with reference to the judiciary and how a powerful executive can encroach on the domain of the judicial branch. In this article, I suggest that the legal profession also needs to be brought into the discussion on autocratic legalism. Taking Turkey as my case, I put forward two main arguments: first, that, in national contexts where the legal profession is perceived to be originally and organically tied to the state-the "ancien regime" that aspiring autocrats try to dismantle-autocratic legalism involves efforts to overtake not only the judiciary but also such legal professional institutions as bar associations and their umbrella organizations and, second, that legal autocratization is made possible not only through such conscious/targeted attacks but also through processes and policies that are intended for other goals. In Turkey, the neoliberalization of legal education through a populist discourse and the consequent massive increase in the lawyer population has created heterogeneity and multiple fault lines within the profession. Such dynamics have created not only apathy, particularly on the part of young(er) lawyers, but also a weakening of the profession as a whole, preparing the groundwork for the more intentional attacks of the autocratic government. The result, I argue, is "professional liquidation."

2025, Maryland Law Review

footnotes omitted). A number of commentators have examined the causes and implications of the modern professionalism crisis. See, e.g., MARY ANN GLEN-DON, A NATION UNDER LAWYERS: How THE CRISIS IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION Is TRANSFORM-INC AMERICAN SOCIETY (1994) (examining fundamental changes in the nature of the legal profession, and the effect those changes are having on American society);

2025, The San Diego law review

2024, Thomas M. Cooley Law Review

2024, S. Tex. L. Rev.

The Bounds of Zeal in Criminal Defense: Some Thoughts on Lynne Stewart Abbe Smith* I. Introduction: The Prosecution of Lynne ... a tough, smart, determined lawyer, dedicated to providing first-rate defense for unpopular clients.");... more

2024, Criminal Justice Ethics

2023, Routledge eBooks

Discussions regarding the 'flooding' of the legal profession have often focused on issues of jurisprudence and legal culture (how people resolve disputes), accessibility to legal education (growth in the number of law schools), social and cultural factors (the status of the profession) and structural barriers to professional entry (how difficult it is to become a lawyer). In this paper I discuss the increasing number of lawyers in Israel (now the highest per capita in developed countries) in reference to an additional factor: the most extensive rules regarding unauthorized practice of law, strictly guarded and enforced by the Israeli Bar Association. In Israeli society law has increasingly become an accepted forum for resolving private and public disputes. At the same time, any kind of activity entailing provision of legal advice, legal documentation or representation is restricted to lawyers only-thus entry into the profession becomes the only way to take part and become engaged in the field of legal services.

2023, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice

Recent national reports have documented growing justice gaps in Canada and have identified a compelling need for innovation in the justice sector to better meet the needs of the public. Nurturing a greater capacity for individual, collective, and critical reflection will ensure the legal profession is much better equipped to respond creatively and strategically to a lack of equal access to justice. In this article, I explore the generative and transformative potential of reflective practice-an important professional competency in other professional disciplines, but under-theorized in law, and action research-a dynamic and flexible form of qualitative research for supporting a culture of innovation in the legal profession and the justice system. Reflective capacity is a crucial enabler of innovative thinking, and it undergirds approaches to encouraging individual and systems change emerging from the organizational learning and innovation literature. An enhanced capacity for reflection will also support more generative and "futureforming" dialogues within the profession and between justice system stakeholders. Furthermore, systematically reflecting on disorienting empirical data about the troubling state of access to justice could develop an "access to justice consciousness" in law students and legal professionals, leading to a stronger willingness to take action to narrow the justice gaps. Introducing action research as an unpretentious and effective enabler of profound transformation and innovation in individual and organizational practices offers significant promise for tackling the "wicked problem" of access to justice. Practical illustrations of action research as an enabler of innovation drawn from legal practice are provided.

2023, The Canadian Bar Review

who as "critical friends" reviewed earlier drafts of this paper and provided helpful feedback and wise counsel, and Rebecca Noble who provided invaluable technical and research support. I would also like to thank the two peer reviewers... more

2023, The Russian Review

In Petr Boborykin's 1889 novel Betrayer (Izmennik), the main protagonist Simtsov enlists his friend, the lawyer Alekseev, to help the husband of his former lover named Bosiakov. Bosiakov is in a lock-up for embezzling four thousand rubles and is in need of money and legal representation. Freed by Alekseev with Simtsov's help, the ungrateful and caddish Bosiakov shows up at Simtsov's to ask for more money and to scoff at his defense attorney. He calls Alekseev "the adulterer of thought" and derides his lack of competence and misguided flights into poetry. Claiming to want to replace him with another attorney, Bosiakov says that he can always "find others ... virtuosos of the word." 1 While best known for its appearance in The Brothers Karamazov, the phrase "the adulterer of thought" was coined not by Dostoevsky but by Evgenii Markov, who used it in his 1875 Golos article "The Sophists of the Nineteenth Century." 2 Markov's devastating portrait of the still young corporation of defense attorneys did much to shape the public view of the profession for decades to come. Flashy and over-confident, Markov's defense attorney is a picture of insolence, vanity, greed, and bad taste. But if the gold pince-nez, the tailcoat, and the expensive briefcase came to symbolize the attorney's obsession with material success and status, Markov's phrase "the adulterer of thought," along with the titular designation "sophists," quickly passed into everyday speech to represent the profession's lack of moral principle. Not only did these phrases enter the vocabulary of the profession's detractors; they also invaded the idiom of its defenders and representatives. Writing more than a decade later in defense of the bar, M. Grebenshchikov reprised numerous I am grateful to the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions that have helped me improve this article. I would also like to thank Jennifer Lee and the staff of the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, especially Jan Adamczyk and Joe Lenkart, for their friendly and patient assistance and bibliographic expertise. 1

2023, The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia

As the two main reasons for such estrangement scholars often cite writers' moral aversion to lawyering and a more abstract, as well as more nationally distinct, antipathy to law, seen as a Western product antithetical to Russian values. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard speech demonstrates, this attitude endured well beyond the reform era. 6 Writing of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Walicki has argued that in spite of their different views on law, both shared a rejection of "the cold legalistic spirit of the West." 7 Wortman similarly remarked of the two greats that they "expressed a common distaste for members of the judicial profession as officials cold and un-Russian in their rational adherence to legal science." 8 The two writers' frustration with law's fetishistic adherence to procedure and its inherent inability to respond, with enough flexibility, to the infinite variety of human situations is, indeed, evident in many works. In Notes from the House of the Dead, for instance, Dostoevsky's narrator Gorianchikov compares the problem of law's insensitivity to the particularity of Slavophile legal thought where it served as an organizing principle of the utopian society whose prototype Slavophiles found in the traditional peasant community (mir) of pre-Petrine Russia. An ideal society of Slavophile imagination was a self-regulating homogeneous body whose members embrace a shared way of life and a collective understanding of common interest. Bonded by organic ties, a community like this is governed by traditional "internal" truths revealed by conscience and has no need for "external" written laws. 37 In later decades, versions of this view were adopted by a range of commentators hostile to the reform, from nationalist conservatives in the mold of Konstantin Pobedonostsev to Christian anarchists in the mold of Leo Tolstoy. Despite its cultural prominence, this ideal is not something one would necessarily expect to influence the discourse of the new, liberally minded lawyer, certainly not to the extent that it did. Indeed, in criminal and penal law theory, the leading scholars like Ivan Foinitsky, Nikolai Tagantsev, and Nikolai Sergeevsky insisted, with different degrees of consistency, on the need to separate morality from law. 38 But on the pages of the nonspecialized His appeal to "higher justice" was a commonplace of forensic oratory among Russian lawyers, as was its equivalent "higher truth." Both reflected the moralistic tenor of the Russian courtroom and could be mobilized, when convenient, to displace truth understood as factual accuracy with a more expansive notion of truth as justice, whether social, moral, or divine. Such substitution was assisted by the capaciousness of the Russian word pravda (truth), which by the middle of the nineteenth century could be made to carry both descriptive and normative connotations. 41 In the often-quoted passage, the populist critic and sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky drew a distinction between pravda istina (an accurate description of what is, truth as an epis-THE DARKER POTENTIAL OF THE "UNPRINCIPLED" HEART Before offering an overview of the chapters, I would like to pause briefly on two common assumptions dominating discussions of "the voice of conscience" in Russian literary studies. The first is that prioritizing morality and the inner "voice of conscience" over the external commands of the law is a distinct feature of Russian justice and of Russian mentality, a view that originated in nationalist conservatism of the nineteenth century and that continues to shape Russian cultural and political consciousness to this day. The second is that this approach to justice represents a gentler, more lenient, and more humanistic jurisprudence. These assumptions, however, reproduce, rather than examine, the spirit of the period's discourse of "conscience," indirectly reasserting its claims of national exceptionalism and overlooking its darker potential. In the public discourse of the time, "judging by conscience" was essentialized as a distinctive feature of the Russian national character and as a reflection of its uniquely compassionate nature. Cast as superior, absolute, felt, Mythologized as the only true Christianity, Russian Orthodox faith was constructed as an antithesis and an antidote to Western legalism that was said to vitiate non-Orthodox Christianity and even more so, Judaism. Indeed, some of the most persistent tropes of the Russian reformist discourse-like the negative labels "Judaic" and "Pharisaic," and some of its central concepts, to the lawyer's professional ideal. In chapter 2, I focus on the responses of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin ([also Saltykov]; a writer of radical sympathies and Russia's foremost satirist at the time) to the child abuse case of Stanislav Kronenberg, well-known to Dostoevsky scholars. Kronenberg was represented by the already mentioned attorney Spasovich, whose defense infuriated the two writers and the public at large. Without denying that their interventions were fueled by moral outrage and opposition to Western-style legalism, which is how this case is usually discussed, I wish to uncover another, generally overlooked, thread in their polemic: one that was shaped by their rejection of elite lawyers' artistic aspirations, civic posturings, and claims of solidarity with the writer's noble goals. Vasilii Rozanov's later essay on Spasovich's review of Dmitry Merezhkovsky makes this underlying layer of his predecessors' critique still more visible. Although Rozanov was responding to a purely literary contribution, and not to Spasovich's activities as a lawyer, the intensity, tenor, and import of his outrage are reminiscent of Saltykov's and Dostoevsky's, as is the rhetoric through which he channels

2023, California Law Review

The most striking aspect of the image of the lawyer in popular culture is the intense hostility with which it is invested. Lawyers, to be sure, may have more than their fair share of common moral shortcomings. But they do not as individuals seem so very different from the rest of the population as to justify the special level of animosity that the profession seems to arouse in the general public. One thinks, for example, of the present genre of what has come to be called "lawyer jokes." For instance: Question: What is the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead skunk? Answer: There are skid marks by the skunk. Or: Question: Why did the research scientist substitute lawyers for rats in his laboratory experiments? Answer: Lawyers breed more rapidly, scientists became less attached to them, and there are some things that rats just won't do. Lawyer bashing is of course nothing new. The genre goes back a long way. St. Luke says in the New Testament: "Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne. ... "i Every lawyer or legal academic carries as a particularly heavy part of her cultural training the usual and vicious swipes at lawyers, from Shakespeare's "let's kill all the lawyers," 2 to Sir Thomas More's exclusion of lawyers from his Utopia because they are "a sort of people, whose profession it is to disguise matters." 3 The nineteenth-century readers and spellers of American schoolchildren often contained a game called "the Colonists,"

2023, Md. L. Rev.

(footnotes omitted). A number of commentators have examined the causes and implications of the modern professionalism crisis. See, e.g., MARY ANN GLEN-DON, A NATION UNDER LAWYERS: How THE CRISIS IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION Is TRANSFORM-INC AMERICAN SOCIETY (1994) (examining fundamental changes in the nature of the legal profession, and the effect those changes are having on American society);

2023, SSRN Electronic Journal

2023, International Journal of Speech Language and the Law

From Truth to Technique at Trial: A Discursive History of Advocacy Advice Texts by Philip Gaines (2016), Oxford University Press xii + 219pp

2023, Cap. UL Rev.

There is no hiding the problem with lawyer ethics. It is a problem we see in law offices, courtrooms, law school classrooms, daily newspapers and magazines,' and on network television. The problem, put simply, is this: Lawyers... more

2023

Refection in action is captured through a year-long litigation simulation exercise for experienced practising lawyers, in which they could experiment in a 'safe' space, followed by an ongoing reflective writing project which... more

2023, Windsor YB Access Just.

2023, LAWYERS ARE LIARS; THE PRESENT DAY FALLACY AND MISCONCEPTION SYNDROME

Lawyers all over the world, since time immemorial, have not been amongst the most admired professionals in society. Common street jokes and memes paint lawyers as heartless and greedy and the same has been sang about in the streets today through songs and the emphasis by some journalists. The newspapers themselves, have a story so clear to narrate about this. Is this just a wake of social media attack on the profession, or are these arguments true?
By: AHIMBISIBWE INNOCENT BENJAMIN (Award winning Entertainment Lawyer)

2022

In April 2019, the Allard School of Law lost one of its most enthusiastic, innovative and generous scholars when Professor W. Wesley Pue passed away after liv- ing courageously with cancer for four years. His con- tributions to the law school and the University of British Columbia over 25 years of dedicated service were many and his impact profound

2022

This paper begins by exploring limitations on the use of opinion polls as a way to assess whether images of lawyers in popular culture (news, television, and film) have an impact on the public image of lawyers. Not surprisingly, most American polls show a wide range �f negative views about lawyers. When asked whether those negative impressions come from popular culture sources, most people will deny that infiuence. Oddly enough, however, if asked about particular personal experiences with individual lawyers, most people will rate having had a fairly satis factory experience. So. that even if people have positive one-an-one ex periences with laWyers, these satisfactory encounters are not capable of displacing what I call their "global negative perception" of lawyers (for example, lawyers are greedy). Like consumers who think themselves free from external influence by advertising, most people when asked whether they draw their views from media sources (especially fictional...

2022

Editors’ Note: Like the benchmark approach, portfolio evaluation seeks to distinguish particular elements that have been learned well from those which will require more work from the student, or from the teacher. Unlike the benchmark approach, portfolio evaluation welcomes, indeed encourages, affective and sensory reflection, rather than an exclusive focus on the cognitive. LeBaron has a strong commitment to a broad view of the field, and her particular use of portfolios gives some room to cultural, physical and even aesthetic elements which, she argues, are often underappreciated in our field. Even in more conventional practice, however, LeBaron contends that portfolio evaluation addresses a series of formative and summative assessment needs – particularly fostering double-loop learning – better than standard approaches have.

2022

2022, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice

2022

Like most criminal lawyers, I like to think of myself as a trial lawyer. It’s in my interest to do so. Among other things, it makes me a much more popular dinner—and perhaps conference—guest. I confess that I tend to tell trial stories more than, say, a guilty plea story. I tell these trial stories to other criminal defenders (to show that I’m keeping up), to students (to enhance my credibility), and to friends and family (because everybody loves a good story). But the truth is, like most criminal lawyers, I spend much of my time—more time than I like to admit—counseling clients about guilty pleas. The time I spend on guilty pleas is consistent with the fact that the overwhelming number of criminal cases is resolved by such pleas. According to the most recent Justice Department data, more than ninetyfive percent of convictions in both state and federal court are due to guilty pleas. It is also consistent with the fact that the single most important decision in any criminal case is w...

2022

§ 4.01 INTRODUCTION Closely related to the concept of client autonomy is the lawyer's obligation to give "entire devotion to the interest of the client, warm zeal in the maintenance and defens~ ofhia_rights and the exertion of[the lawyer's] ut~Jlostlear,ning and ability." 1 This ethic of zeal is a "traditional aspiration" 2 that was alrea(ly established in Abraham Lincoln's day, 3 and continues today to be "the fundamental principle of the law of lawyering'' 4 and "the dominant standard of lawyerly excellence.' 15 Client autonomy refers to the client's right to decide what her own interests are. Zeal refers to the dedication with which the'lawyer furthers the client's interests. The ethic of zeal is, therefore, pervasive in lawyers' professional responsibilities because it informs all of the lawyer's other ethical obligations with "entire devotion to the interest of the client.'' The classic statement of that ideal is by Lord Henry Brougham in his representation of the Queen in Queen Caroline's Case in 1821. In an early instance of "graymail," Brougham threatened to defend his client on a ground that would have cost the King his crown and might well have caused a revolution: [A]n advocate, in the discharge of ,his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, amongst them, to himself, is his first and only duty; and in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the tonnents, the destruction :which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of the consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion. 6

2022

What are some of the challenges and possibilities animating modern Canadian clinical and experiential learning in law? This question was the starting point for our research, which examined two sets of data. In the first part of this project, we analyzed available information on existing clinical and experiential learning programs in Canadian law schools. This data revealed a growing quantity and variety of programs across the country. We then held qualitative interviews with deans, professors, and clinicians across Canada regarding their views of clinical and experiential learning. While the interviews suggested that many of the same financial and curricular challenges that dominated early debates remain stubbornly entrenched, there are also significant promising views and practices. No longer regarded by most as a legal education outlier, clinical and experiential learning has come out of the curricular shadows and taken a prominent place in most law schools in Canada. Nuanced ques...

2022

This special edition of the Canadian Bar Review stems from the event, Transforming Legal Education in Canada: A Workshop to Inspire Change, hosted jointly by the Canadian Bar Review and the Legal Futures Initiative in Toronto in March 2016. The workshop brought together academics, lawyers and law students for a day of creative thinking. Participants worked together in small groups to critically analyze and test emerging ideas on how to select, educate, license, train, and assess the lawyers of the future. In addition, thirteen scholars, practitioners, and professional educators presented papers, introducing new ideas and sparking the day’s discussion. Readers of the Canadian Bar Review can now also engage with those thought-provoking ideas through this special edition.

2022, Arab Studies Quarterly

In The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, Emile Habiby (1922–1996) addresses the question of Palestinian historiography during the Mandate period through Al-Nakba of 1948 and the second defeat of the Arabs by Israel, in the 1967 June War. Having remained in what became Israel, the Palestinian writer tells the history from the Palestinian perspective and from the “insider's” perspective, to rehabilitate the misperceptions about Arabs and their story. This article will argue that The Pessoptimist, the Palestinian national epic, challenges the mono-vision of the Israeli/Western version that has disseminated myths about what occurred between 1947 and 1948. By inserting into the creative writing the oral history told by Palestinians to their children and grandchildren, and which had failed entry into the official Israeli/western version, Habiby's narrative sets the record straight regarding the labeling of Palestinian resistance fighters as “terrorists.” Constructing a histo...

2022, Wake Forest Law Review

Unquestionably, "popular respect for the legal profession is steadily falling"; there is "much cause for discouragement and some cause for alarm. " 1 "[L]awyers ... are blamed for some serious public problems," including the enormous costs of increased litigation. 2 "Year by year the various law schools send increasing armies of new recruits, far beyond the requirements of even this litigious community."3 Lawyers act with "exaggerated contentious[ness],»4 as if they were "gladiator[s]" in a war, making every effort to "wipe out the other side." 5 Among the causes of this crisis is the attitude that the law is no longer a profession, but a mere competitive business in which its members face increased "economic pressure[s]." 6 Better legal education may not even help because "[t]he evil ... is not so much a professional as an American fault. It has its source in our inordinate love for the almighty dollar." 7 Without the footnotes, it takes some care to distinguish the previous paragraph's turn of the twentieth century quotations from its turn of the twenty-first century quotations. 8 Remember,

2022

Declarations of independence independence from clients independence from other "Avocats" virtues comparisons the historical context procedural contexts other legal professions decline and revival.

2022

2021, Social Science Research Network

This article explores the concept of lawyers’ "professional independence" in the literature of the U.S. legal profession. It begins with some reflections on the conventional meanings of professional independence, which encompasses both the bar’s collective independence to regulate its members and individual lawyers’ independence in the context of professional representations, including independence from clients, on one hand, and independence from third parties, on the other. The article suggests that the professional conduct rules are overly preoccupied with protecting lawyers’ professional independence from the corrupting influences of other professionals. The article then turns to an aspect of professional independence that has largely dropped out of lawyers’ discourse but that deserves more attention, namely, lawyers’ independence from the courts. This includes: (1) freedom to criticize judges; (2) freedom to disobey arguably unlawful court orders; and (3) freedom to re...

2021, N C L Rev

MODEL CODE OF PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY Canon 7 (1981) [hereinafter MODEL CODE]; id. DR 7-101; id. EC 7-1; MODEL RULES OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT Rule 1.3 comment (1983) [hereinafter MODEL RULES]. The concept of "zealous representation" embraces the traditional view that the interests of the lawyer's client are generally paramount to the interest in the administration of justice and almost invariably paramount to the interests of third parties. See, eg.,

2021

Twenty-first century legal professionals need a reflective legal education that emphasizes self-assessment and self-efficacy; supports life-long learning; and builds the capacity for innovative thinking and responding creatively and constructively to “wicked problems”. “Reflective practice”—a core competency in other professions—has the potential to enhance the education of legal professionals by developing these skills. Encouraging and modelling reflective practice is best started in law school. This article aims to facilitate a dialogue about how reflective practice might be integrated into the law school curriculum and provides conceptual frameworks to help envision how reflective practice might be operationalized. Examples of reflective methods to help develop it as a competency will also be given. Reflective practice, as a disciplined form of reflective inquiry, offers the potential to enhance law student learning and, more systematically, develop professional expertise. Amongs...

2021

When the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted its Code of Professional Responsibility at its annual meeting in August 1969, the American legal profession was a publicly respected and economically vibrant body. Lawyers, though always more feared than loved, became increasingly important in post-World War II America. The demand for their services exploded for a quarter-century, and lawyers assumed an increased role in the economic and political life of the United States. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War led American lawyers and other public figures to re-emphasize the rule of law as defining the difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. Relatedly, American lawyers argued they possessed a central role in maintaining the rule of law. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, the popular image of lawyers may have peaked. It was at this time that the ABA began its work to update the 1908 Canons of Ethics. The ABA’s adoption of the Code of Professional Responsi...