The Limits of Permissible Judicial Campaign Speech in New York

(Excerpt) In December 2018, New York’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics (“ACJE”), which I proudly served on for ten years, issued Opinion 17-28, concerning an inquiry by a judicial candidate as to whether he or she could respond to a candidate questionnaire prepared by the New York State Right to Life Committee (“RTL questionnaire”). In the RTL questionnaire, the candidate is asked a series of questions concerning the candidate’s personal beliefs on abortion, the beginning of life, Roe v. Wade, the definition of personhood, the New York and United States Constitutions, and so on. Each question asking for the candidate’s personal beliefs is preceded by a prefatory acknowledgment of “the judicial obligation to follow binding precedents of higher courts and applicable constitutional and statutory provisions, to honor stare decisis, and to decide any future case based on the law and facts of that case.” Concluding that the RTL questionnaire, “when viewed as a whole, is clearly designed to elicit a series of implied pledges, promises, and commitments, touching on a wide variety of closely interrelated issues that may come before judges at every level of the judiciary” and that “a candidate’s impartiality” could “ ‘reasonably be questioned’ in a wide variety of cases . . . if he/she agreed to the bold-faced statements on the questionnaire,” the candidate was advised to decline responding to it. As I strongly disagree with the ACJE’s opinion, I write this Article to express my personal views on the subject. Let me emphasize that this Article reflects my attempt to engage in a reasoned analysis of an admittedly difficult topic which, in my opinion, has not been sufficiently explored or discussed by academics, ethics committees, or judges since the Supreme Court of the United States decided Republican Party of Minnesota v. White (occasionally abbreviated herein as “White”)

Advocacy in the Court of Public Opinion, Installment Two: How Far Should Corporate Attorneys Go

Today, legal controversies are tried in the court of public opinion as much as in any court of law. Corporate lawyers\u27 traditional tendency, however, has been to attempt to isolate legal activities from public relations activities. Accordingly, when providing legal advice, they have viewed media considerations as separate. Historically corporate counsels\u27 typical media strategy often consisted of no more than, no comment. Given today\u27s saturated media culture, this is no longer a viable strategy. Indeed, it appears that some corporate lawyers are adapting to the new media environment and attempting to help their clients manage the public relations impact of legal controversies. To date, however, there has been little systematic evidence gathered on the role corporate lawyers play in the court of public opinion for their clients\u27 legal controversies and little sustained examination of the implications of these trends. The purpose of this project is to analyze: (1) how the court of public opinion impacts legal controversies of large, publicly traded corporations that have high demand for legal services; (2) how the general counsels of these corporations manage the intersection of public relations and law; and (3) what should be the corporate lawyer\u27s ethical obligations, if any, in this extra-judicial court. To investigate these questions, the author sent a questionnaire to all general counsels of the S&P 500 and conducted fifty-seven interviews with general counsels of S&P 500 corporations, law firm partners, and public relations consultants. The preliminary findings from this study will appear in two installments in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. The first installment focuses on how the court of public opinion can impact legal controversies and how corporate attorneys currently manage legal public relations for their corporate clients. It argues that the court of public opinion is a real part of our justice system and that managing legal public relations (legal PR) is a legitimate and fundamental component of corporate legal services. It contends that the role corporate attorneys play in managing legal PR for corporate clients. is at odds with the conventional view and that it is time to broaden our view of the corporate attorney\u27s role in this arena. The second installment highlights examples of wrongdoing by corporate attorneys and contends that there is little oversight of lawyers\u27 typical management of legal PR behind the scenes. Because professional guidelines focus on lawyers\u27 extrajudicial statements regarding matters that are adjudicated in a court of law, they put the spotlight on the wrong place and are therefore not relevant to the way corporate lawyers manage public relations. Moreover, these professional guidelines risk a race to the bottom where lawyers\u27 ability to spin is valued over their ability to provide effective legal advice that accounts for PR concerns and the corporation\u27s long-term interests. Although the court of public opinion is an extra-legal decision-maker, it does not fit the traditional adjudicative proceeding paradigm. Therefore, the second installment contends that some level of advocacy may be appropriate in that alternate-court, but that corporate lawyers should still act in a socially responsible manner and counsel their clients to act that way as well. Ultimately, this Article recommends revised education methods and disciplinary rules to provide better guidance to lawyers as to how to ethically manage legal PR for corporate clients

Pressure Effect on Band Inversion in AECd2As2

Recent studies have predicted that magnetic EuCd2As2 can host several different topological states depending on its magnetic order, including a single pair of Weyl points. Here we report on the bulk properties and band inversion induced by pressure in the non-magnetic analogs AECd2As2 (AE = Ca, Sr, Ba) as studied with density functional theory calculations. Under ambient pressure we find these compounds are narrow band gap semiconductors, in agreement with experiment. The size of the band gap is dictated by both the increasing ionicity across the AE series which tends to increase the band gap, as well as the larger nearest neighbor Cd-As distance from increasing atomic size which can decrease the band gap because the conduction band edge is an anti-bonding state derived mostly from Cd 5s orbitals. The combination of these two competing effects results in a non-monotonic change of the band gap size across the AE series with SrCd2As2 having the smallest band gap among the three compounds. The application of negative pressure reduces this band gap and causes the band inversion between the Cd 5s and As 4p orbitals along the ${\Gamma}$-A direction to induce a pair of Dirac points. The topological nature of the Dirac points is then confirmed by finding the closed Fermi arcs on the (10-10) surface.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Extraction efficiency of drifting electrons in a two-phase xenon time projection chamber

We present a measurement of the extraction efficiency of quasi-free electrons from the liquid into the gas phase in a two-phase xenon time-projection chamber. The measurements span a range of electric fields from 2.4 to 7.1 kV/cm in the liquid xenon, corresponding to 4.5 to 13.1 kV/cm in the gaseous xenon. Extraction efficiency continues to increase at the highest extraction fields, implying that additional charge signal may be attained in two-phase xenon detectors through careful high-voltage engineering of the gate-anode region