Beyond the Model Rules: The Place of Examples in Legal Ethics

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct defined the agenda for the post- Watergate renaissance in legal ethics. While there had been some form of codified precepts for American lawyers since at least 1908, Watergate inspired a desire to clean up a disgraced profession. The American Bar Association (ABA) promulgated the Model Rules; law schools instituted mandatory courses; and scholars debated and analyzed the new Model Rules. The organized bar devoted much time and attention to developing these guidelines. The mainstream media covered both the bar\u27s original efforts and the subsequent adoption of the Model Rules by particular jurisdictions. Today, forty-three American jurisdictions have adopted ethics guidelines based closely on the Model Rules

The legal life of objects : speaking evidence and mute subjects in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

textIn this paper, I argue that legal authorities assign speaking power to objects and evidence in the courtroom in order to deny speaking power to racialized subjects and police racial identities. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) demonstrates how the law transverses the human/object boundary in order to regulate legal definitions of identity. I examine the legal animation of the textual document, as exemplified by the last will and testament; the knife, a material object that as a murder weapon is responsible for condemning the accused; and the fingerprint, a unique form of bodily evidence that merges the textual and the material, in order to understand how these objects blur the line between the living and the deceased, between human and nonhuman agency, and between body and text. My methodology brings object studies into conversation with a literature and the law approach in order to show not only how the nineteenth-century American literary imagination was concerned with testing and regulating racial boundaries, but also how fictions employed by the law produce subjects and objects. My investigation reminds us that when evidence appears to “speak for itself,” this speech act has been carefully orchestrated by human legal authorities who determine what the evidence can be understood to mean and for whom it speaks.Englis

You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well

You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well

A Critical Analysis of Jurgen Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Morality: Exposing Some of its Unadmitted Ethical Assumptions

This paper defends the claim that Habermas’s distinction between the moral and the ethical depends on some un-stated assumptions that he is not willing to accept. One of the assumptions concerns the presumption of the equality of the discourse participants; the other implicit assumption in his discourse theory of morality concerns the issue of reciprocity and symmetrical power relations. He takes each discourse participant as free to initiate a dialogue and to challenge the validity claims of discourse participants. Such assumptions undermine Habermas’s commitment for ethical neutrality and his rejection of the substantive notions of truth. He argues that although our everyday interactions are pervaded by distortions and asymmetrical power relations there are operative principles such as reciprocity and symmetrical power relations inherent in language. The question precisely is: why should we take the principles that are inherent in language for granted? It appears as though Habermas has a pre-given reason to endorse the principles in question. By disapproving the use of threat, coercion and intimidation in the process of argumentation, and instead by insisting for the employment of, among others, symmetrical relation, Habermas is affirming the claim that humans are beings that command each other’s respect. But the question precisely is, why do they command each other’s respect? It appears that we cannot commit ourselves to this claim without affirming a given ontology of the human and Habermas is exactly doing that

Negotiating the Jurisprudential Terrain: A Model Theoretic Approach to Legal Theory

This paper explores borrowing a meta-theoretical approach to theory from the natural and social sciences in order to provide a framework within which to situate and evaluate the various theories one encounters in the field of law and jurisprudence. Often it is the case that students of jurisprudence go from one school or theory to another with one of three responses: (1) this makes no sense to me; (2) this makes some sense, but what is the point or relevance; or (3) this makes sense and seems true, but so do many of the schools, theories, and theorists we have studied. How do we make sense of this feeling that many of the theories we encounter seem true? Is it that we really do not understand them, or is it because we are dealing with them too superficially? Can one meaningfully and usefully create a theory or model of legal theory or jurisprudence that helps us answer these questions, or is jurisprudence really just a ragbag or set of conceptual claims about labels? Is the search for something called truth in law a mistaken enterprise

Negotiating the Jurisprudential Terrain: A Model Theoretic Approach to Legal Theory

This paper explores borrowing a meta-theoretical approach to theory from the natural and social sciences in order to provide a framework within which to situate and evaluate the various theories one encounters in the field of law and jurisprudence. Often it is the case that students of jurisprudence go from one school or theory to another with one of three responses: (1) this makes no sense to me; (2) this makes some sense, but what is the point or relevance; or (3) this makes sense and seems true, but so do many of the schools, theories, and theorists we have studied. How do we make sense of this feeling that many of the theories we encounter seem true? Is it that we really do not understand them, or is it because we are dealing with them too superficially? Can one meaningfully and usefully create a theory or model of legal theory or jurisprudence that helps us answer these questions, or is jurisprudence really just a ragbag or set of conceptual claims about labels? Is the search for something called truth in law a mistaken enterprise

Issues and Challenges of African Traditional Moral Education

The paper examines the methods of African traditional moral education. It is also an attempt to bring to light prohibitions and taboo that regulate the conduct of the individual members of the community. African traditional education took place almost entirely within the family and limited social grouping, such as peer age groups and the village gatherings. The paper points out that though, there were no systematized, formalized school – type methods of moral education, educators in traditional African society had at their disposal a variety of tools for effective moral education, for example, we have the method of emulation, repeat after me approach. We equally have other methods such as stories with fictitious character, proverbs, as well as caution and prohibition. Other factors that affect the moral training of children e.g. in Nigeria were customs, practices, and religious belief of parents. The paper concludes that since education is founded on human nature any education that is devoid of morality is incomplete and useless. Keywords: Moral, Education, Proverbs, Taboos