Professional Responsibility, A Student's Guide, 2011-2012

This book on legal ethics is the premier text that examines the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, the ABA Code of Judicial Conduct, the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers, and the case law. The book is analytical, concise, and thorough. Empirical studies show that many lawyers are unaware of even basic information about legal ethics, the law governing lawyers. Older lawyers, who draw a disproportionate number of malpractice suits, often have neither formally studied ethics nor kept up with developments in the law. Many malpractice suits arise out of ethics violations, such as disqualification of lawyers for conflicts of interest, multi-disciplinary practice, and the attorney-client evidentiary and ethical privilege. The Ethics Rules are law typically adopted by court rule in the same way that the Rules of Civil Procedure are law. These Ethics Rules are just as complex as the Civil Practice Rules or the Evidence Rules. Many of the Ethics Rules cannot be known through some sort of innate or hereditary awareness automatically infused in ordinary human beings once they are admitted to the bar. Unless a student wants to emulate those lawyers who draw a disproportionate number of malpractice suits, he or she will need to understand the law of Legal Ethics. And to do that, one needs this book. This new edition continues the tradition of excellence found in the prior editions. It discusses the new ABA rule that allows screening to avoid conflicts of interest problems, it analyzes the new cases on such important issues as attorney client confidentiality, conflicts of interest, and fee disputes. The separate chapter on Judicial Discipline and Judicial Ethics alerts both judges and lawyers of the rules and constitutional restrictions governing such issues as judicial disqualification, judicial election campaigns, and ex parte communications, and judges receiving gifts from lawyers or parties that appear before them. Judges are citing this book with increasing frequency and no lawyer or judge should be without it.