Dishonest Ethical Advocacy?: False Defenses in Criminal Court

This Note examines this dilemma and recent judicial approaches to it. Judges disagree about how guilty criminal defendants should be permitted to mount defenses at trial. Some have forbidden defense counsel from knowingly advancing any false exculpatory proposition. Others have permitted guilty defense attorneys to present sincere or truthful testimony in order to bolster a falsehood. And still others have signaled more general comfort with the idea that an attorney aggressively can pursue an acquittal on behalf of a guilty client. This Note seeks to resolve this issue by parsing the range of false defense tactics available to attorneys and evaluating the propriety of each under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. This Note reads the Model Rules in the context of the adversary system’s twin aims to seek truth and safeguard individual rights; it defines and categorizes specific false defense tactics; and it offers practical, context-specific recommendations to courts and attorneys evaluating knowingly false defenses as they occur in the real world

Big Brother or Little Brother? Surrendering Seizure Privacy for the Benefits of Communication Technology

Over two centuries have passed since Benjamin Franklin quipped that we should defend privacy over security if people wanted either privacy or security. Although his axiom did not become a rule of law in its original form, its principles found voice in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution\u27s Bill of Rights. To a lesser extent, provisions against the quartering of troops in private homes found in the Third Amendment also support the idea that what a government can require you to do, or who you must have behind the doors of your home, is an area of grave importance for privacy purposes. By our behavior as a nation, have we indicated a rejection of the liberty Franklin was writing about in our modern times? In no area has the rapid rise of technology affected our lives more than in the area of communication through computers and other devices, like so called smart telephones. As long as people have been communicating, there has been a desire for others to be interested in hearing what they say. Sometimes the speaker or writer desires an audience and the speaker\u27s freedom to communicate desires protection. At other times, people intend to keep their private words private while others desire to know their thoughts and intentions. This human desire, the right to be let alone, has both practical and legal limitations. Obviously society has its own right to protect its members from violence and keep the peace by legislating and enforcing criminal law. When technology comes into existence, law enforcement often uses it first to engage in the competitive enterprise [to] ferret out crime. Further, the technology itself may make it impossible to permit people who desire to keep information private from achieving that goal. Among the reasons that keeping matters private has become more difficult is that the law simply cannot keep up with the rapid rise in communications technology

Big Brother or Little Brother? Surrendering Seizure Privacy for the Benefits of Communication Technology

Over two centuries have passed since Benjamin Franklin quipped that we should defend privacy over security if people wanted either privacy or security. Although his axiom did not become a rule of law in its original form, its principles found voice in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution\u27s Bill of Rights. To a lesser extent, provisions against the quartering of troops in private homes found in the Third Amendment also support the idea that what a government can require you to do, or who you must have behind the doors of your home, is an area of grave importance for privacy purposes. By our behavior as a nation, have we indicated a rejection of the liberty Franklin was writing about in our modern times? In no area has the rapid rise of technology affected our lives more than in the area of communication through computers and other devices, like so called smart telephones. As long as people have been communicating, there has been a desire for others to be interested in hearing what they say. Sometimes the speaker or writer desires an audience and the speaker\u27s freedom to communicate desires protection. At other times, people intend to keep their private words private while others desire to know their thoughts and intentions. This human desire, the right to be let alone, has both practical and legal limitations. Obviously society has its own right to protect its members from violence and keep the peace by legislating and enforcing criminal law. When technology comes into existence, law enforcement often uses it first to engage in the competitive enterprise [to] ferret out crime. Further, the technology itself may make it impossible to permit people who desire to keep information private from achieving that goal. Among the reasons that keeping matters private has become more difficult is that the law simply cannot keep up with the rapid rise in communications technology

Libre culture: meditations on free culture

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms

Freedom at Work: Campaign Toolkit 2009

This guide examines the ways in which the right to associate freely is violated in workplaces around the world. The first section outlines why defending the right to organize can help empower working women, end trafficking, curb forced and child labor, defend the rights of migrants, and protect consumers. The second section explains why worker rights are an essential component of human rights. The last section presents a series of case studies of violations of the right to organize from around the world

Justification, knowledge, and normality

There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith 2016, Goodman and Salow 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. These cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or too externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on *knowledge*, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification, that depends directly upon normality

Lawyers as Upholders of Human Dignity (When They Aren\u27t Busy Assaulting It)

David Luban argues in this lecture that the moral foundation of the lawyer\u27s profession lies in the defense of human dignity-and the chief moral danger facing the profession arises when lawyers assault human dignity rather than defend it. The concept of human dignity has a rich philosophical tradition, with some philosophers identifying human dignity as a metaphysical property of individuals-a property such as having a soul, or possessing autonomy. Luban argues instead that human dignity is a relational property of the dignifier and the dignified, emphasizing that assaulting human dignity humiliates the victim. Lawyers honor the human dignity of others by protecting them against humiliations, and defile that dignity by subjecting them to humiliations. The lecture develops these ideas through four traditional issues in legal ethics: the right of criminal defendants to an advocate, the duty of confidentiality, paternalism of attorneys toward their clients, and pro bono service