Case Study 3: Movement Lawyers and Community Organizers in Litigation: Issues of Finances and Collaboration

This essay represents one of several Case Studies published as the Movement Lawyering Roundtable Symposium by Hofstra Law Review. The Case Studies were developed within a roundtable of movement lawyers, community organizers, and legal ethics experts convened in March, 2018 by the Monroe H. Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics at Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law. This Case Study addresses the ethical tensions encountered by movement lawyers and community organizers engaged in public interest litigation. The Study consists of three topics, with resulting ethics analyses of the issues that arise in the differing settings. The first involves questions of financing the broad work of a community organizing client, while honoring the mandates of the rule of professional conduct prohibiting a lawyer from offering financial assistance to clients in litigation. The second issue addressed how lawyers might share attorneys’ fees awards with community groups who are ongoing clients. The third issue pivots to questions of how movement lawyers might counsel community organizations about disagreements with other pro bono lawyers representing the clients. Each of these sets of legal ethics issues arises in movement lawyering practice, and can be confounding. This essay seeks to offer guidance to lawyers navigating these sometimes delicate ethical waters

Brief of Amici Curiae Human Rights Organizations in Support of Plaintiffs-Appellants, Georges v. United Nations, Docket No. 15-00455 (Second Circuit 2015)

Amici Curiae consist of twenty-four human rights organizations from the United States and around the world that are committed to the rule of law and respect for fundamental rights, including the essential requirement of accountability for wrongdoing. Amici are deeply concerned that thousands of innocent victims of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti, which is widely acknowledged to have been caused by the United Nations and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (“MINUSTAH”), have received no redress for their suffering and injuries. This cholera epidemic compounded the profound suffering already experienced by the Haitian people as a result of the massive earthquake that destroyed much of the country on January 12, 2010. Amici are equally concerned with the decision of the district court which effectively grants the United Nations impunity for its wrongful actions. Impunity is contrary to the entire architecture of international law, including human rights law, to which the United Nations is inextricably bound. As such, the district court’s decision incorrectly interprets the governing treaty provisions in this case and inappropriately absolves the United Nations from its firm duty to prevent the arbitrary deprivation of life and provide remediation for its own wrongdoing. Amici write to provide the Court with an understanding of the governing international law principles that constrain the U.N.’s entitlement to immunity in this case