Hot Topics in the Legal Profession - 2012

Current important events in the U.S. legal profession and legal ethics, with useful research and analysis of the rules and the profession's current status, are analyzed by Tulane law students from an Advanced Professional Responsibility seminar. The collection is edited by Tulane legal ethics professor Steven Alan Childress, and he previews in his Foreword the students' explorations of the big stories of lawyers and the legal field from 2011. Purchase of this book benefits Tulane's Public Interest Law Foundation, a nonprofit student group that funds public interest placements and indigent client representations throughout the country. The timely topics include: false guilty pleas and candor to the court, ethical considerations in keeping the client's files as a digital record, legal outsourcing and competition, the dilemma of student debt in a slowed legal economy, the practice of law by legal websites like LegalZoom, the capital defense of Jared Lee Loughner, Justice Scalia's constitutional seminar for conservative congressmembers, sensitivity to "cultural competence," prosecutorial relationships with key witnesses, bar discipline for behavior outside the practice of law, negotiation ethics, hybridized MDL settlements, and the advocate-witness rule. This book is a detailed and timely follow-up to the 2010 Hot Topics book, also published in the Benefit Tulane PILF Series by Quid Pro Books. Its chapters are accessible to lawyers and, not bogged down with heavy legal jargon, to anyone interested in current topics of interest about the state of and conflicts in the legal profession and the justice system.

The volume's authors are law students from Tulane University who participated in an advanced ethics seminar and wrote papers on the subject of ethics and the legal profession. The editor, Steven Alan Childress, is the Conrad Meyer III Professor of Law at Tulane. He is the coauthor of 'Federal Standards of Review' (4th ed. 2010); he holds his law degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from Berkeley.