Attorneys Must Not Enter Partnership Agreements Prohibiting Themselves from Representing Former Clients Upon Termination of Partnership. Dwyer v. Jung, 133 N.J. Super. 343, 336 A.2d 498 (Ch. 1975), appeal docketed, No. 3378-74, App. Div., June 18, 1975.

Three attorneys entered into a partnership agreement for the practice of law. Their agreement included a provision that assigned the partnership\u27s insurance carrier clients to individual partners upon the termination of the partnership and restricted the partners from doing business with a client designated as that of another partner for a period of five years. Of these insurance carrier clients, 154 were assigned to the defendant while five were allotted to the plaintiffs. After the partnership was dissolved, the plaintiffs sought a judicial accounting. The defendant counterclaimed, contending that the plaintiffs violated the restrictive covenant of the original partnership agreement by attempting to do business with clients designated as his. Plaintiffs denied the charge and argued that the covenant apportioning clients to individual partners had the effect of prohibiting the other partners from dealing with those clients and was therefore void as against public policy. The plaintiffs also contended that they had entered into the agreement at the insistence of the defendant, even though all parties regarded the provision as unenforceable. The Superior Court of New Jersey, Chancery Division, held that the covenant in the partnership agreement restricted the partnership\u27s clients in their choice of counsel and was thus void for public policy reasons. The court refused to apply the standards usually used in evaluating restrictive covenants

Anything You Say May Be Used Against You : A Proposed Seminar on the Lawyer’s Duty to Warn of Confidentiality’s Limits in Today\u27s Post-Enron World

In light of recent developments, the confidence that one\u27s communications with a lawyer will remain sacrosanct today may be badly misplaced. This raises important questions concerning the duty of lawyers: When, to what extent, and in what detail, does an attorney communicating with someone who may expect confidentiality, have a duty to explain in advance the circumstances under which the information gained may subsequently be revealed pursuant to these or other confidentiality loopholes? Will the interviewee “clam up” in the face of such Miranda-like warnings? If so, what does this do to the premise of Upjohn and the Model Rule comment that confidentiality enables attorneys to obtain the facts necessary to advise properly against illegality? These are significant questions and are the central focus of this essay. But rather than directly answering, I propose a law school student seminar to explore them. In the course thereof, I venture directions toward some tentative conclusions

Giving Up the Ghost: Alaska Bar Ethics Opinion 93-1 and Undisclosed Attorney Assistance Revisited

Twenty years ago, the Alaska Bar Association adopted Ethics Opinion No. 93-1 which permitted attorneys to ghostwrite pleadings and provide other undisclosed services to pro se litigants. The goal of this ethical guidance was to enable attorneys to assist low-income individuals who could not otherwise afford representation. Ethics Opinion No. 93-1 construed ghostwriting broadly as an attorney\u27s undisclosed assistance to a pro se client whether by providing legal advice or drafting pleadings or other documents. This Note argues that, despite the moral allure of its theoretical justifications, ghostwriting is unnecessary, provides little demonstrable benefit to pro se litigants, and potentially conceals the unethical practice of law. Ghostwriting may also confuse the interactions between judges and pro se litigants in a way that works against the pro se party\u27s interests. Specifically, this Note argues that ghostwriting may cause judges to misapprehend pro se litigants\u27 legal understanding and to withdraw prematurely the solicitude those judges are otherwise required to give. Therefore, the Alaska Bar Association should revise its guidance on ghostwriting to require attorneys providing unbundled services to append their Alaska Bar Number on their submissions. This requirement would discourage abuses, enable judges effectively to manage pro se litigants, and still permit experimentation in the unbundled legal market

A \u3ci\u3eDr. Strangelove\u3c/i\u3e Situation : Nuclear Anxiety, Presidential Fallibility, and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

This Article is a revisionist history of the ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which establishes procedures for remedying a vice presidential vacancy and for addressing presidential inability. During the Cold War, questions of presidential succession and the transfer of power in the case of inability were on the public’s mind and, in 1963, these questions became more urgent in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Traditional legal histories of the Amendment argue that President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was both the proximate and prime factor in the development of the Amendment, but they do not account for the pervasive nuclear anxiety inherent in American politics and culture at the time. Oral interviews of key actors, such as former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, the Amendment’s architect, as well as examination of the Lyndon B. Johnson papers, the files of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and other previously unexamined archives, offer new insight into the anxiety and thought processes of the President, Congress, and state legislators. With the ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on February 10, 1967, the nuclear anxiety of the era became ingrained in the Constitution itself. The framers of the Amendment adjusted America’s foundational document not as dictated by a momentary whim but by the exigencies of the times. With the goal of expanding the field of legal history by examining cultural and political factors, this Article argues that nuclear anxiety provides another important explanation for the incorporation of the Amendment

The American Bar Association and Federal Habeas Corpus

Yackle evaluates the ABA\u27s claims touching federal habeas corpus in death penalty cases. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 embrace the ABA\u27s policy for habeas corpus

Accreditation Reconsidered

Higher education is one of the most successful sectors in the nation at a time when much of the economy is struggling. Its quality has been buoyed by a long tradition of investment, both public and private, and by a healthy degree of autonomy from governmental control. America’s three governance innovations, citizen governing boards, shared governance, and accreditation, also have encouraged both quality and institutional autonomy in higher education. Accreditation has been a particularly important contributor to the institutional diversity and vitality of American colleges and universities. Most nations have a ministry of education that oversees institutions of higher education. But, such centralized control too often stifles innovation and quality. By contrast, the United States has long relied on private accreditors that use periodic peer assessments to support continuous quality improvement. Legal accreditation at the moment is out of step with most of higher education accreditation because of arbitrary limits placed on the participation of legal educators by the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. It is time for legal education to have a system of accreditation that is grounded on peer assessment, dedicated to improving, and not just assessing, the quality of legal education, and guided by the same peer governance structure that has worked so well for the rest of American higher education