Navigating Troubled Waters: Dealing with Personal Values When Representing Others

Legal academics have long struggled to define the appropriate role a lawyer\u27s moral judgment ought to play in client representation. In its simplest terms, the question is: Must a lawyer be a hired gun, seeking all lawful objectives sought by a client, or may a lawyer act independently to avoid the harm a client\u27s actions will cause innocent parties? Following disclosure of lawyer involvement in the Savings and Loan, Enron and WorldCom failures, many in society joined those scholars calling for greater moral responsibility. In this article, I provide an analytical approach consistent with existing law and practice that seeks to find a place for an individual lawyer\u27s moral principles. Lawyers, particularly new lawyers, need to know just how much discretion they will have to follow their consciences. Understanding the limits on one\u27s moral discretion will affect the way a lawyer practices and should influence her choice of practice environment. Prior to accepting a position, a lawyer should know whether she will be comfortable with the prevailing standards of practice

Review of Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan, by William H. Colby

[Excerpt] Bill Colby is the lawyer who represented the family of Nancy Cruzan in one of the nation’s most important “right to die” cases. Ms. Cruzan was a twenty-five year old woman who, due to a car accident, was deprived of oxygen for a significant time and cast into a persistent vegetative state. Colby’s book, Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan, is a nonfiction account of his journey with the Cruzan’s family over the course of almost seven years. Along the way, Attorney Colby, who was just five years out of law school when he agreed to represent the Cruzans, gave the first oral argument of his career in the Missouri Supreme Court and his second in the U.S. Supreme Court. He battled with a series of heavyweights, including Ken Starr (of Clinton impeachment fame), then Missouri Governor and now U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and William Webster. This book is anything but another self-absorbed story about a lawyer’s “big case.” It is a movingly written tale of a loving family faced with a tragedy, a clear and concise primer on complex “right to die” issues, and an inspirational tale about the way lawyers ought to relate to their clients

Book Review

Review of: MARC A. RODWIN, MEDICINE, MONEY & MORALS: PHYSICIANS\u27 CONFLICTS OF INTEREST. (Oxford University Press 1993). [430 pp.] Acknowledgements, acronyms, appendices, foreword, index, notes. LC: 92-49488; ISBN: 0-19-508096-3. [Cloth $25.00. 200 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016.

Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one\u27s students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking? While the question of how to define and evaluate teaching necessarily bedevils deans and tenure committees who must make personnel decisions, the focus on defining the competent teacher has obscured from faculty attention the more fundamental question: how can we implement a system to improve faculty performance across the board? It is this question that law schools around the country have not adequately addressed. Three years ago, the faculty of Franklin Pierce Law Center adopted a program to improve our classroom teaching. This article describes and evaluates that program, in which all three authors played a role

Book Review

Review of the book Codes of Professional Responsibility (Rena A. Gorlin, ed., BNA Books, 1990). This 555 page book includes 43 codes of conduct promulgated by the major professional associations in business, health, and law. Each code is preceded by a brief description of the relevant association, including its address and phone number, and information relating to implementation and enforcement. The book concludes with three helpful resource lists including: first, research centers, educational programs and governmental bodies dealing with ethical issues; second, journals and periodical services; and, third, bibliographies, databases and libraries with special ethics collections. The resource sections and indices should be of great use to anyone doing research on ethics

Book Review

Review of: MARSHALL A. KAPP, ETHICAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. (Greenwood Press 1992). [200 pp.] Number 17 in series, Bibliographies and Indices in Gerontology. Author index; foreword by Erdman B. Palmore, series editor; preface; subject index. LC: 92-17776; ISBN: 0-313-27490-8. [Cloth $45.00. P.O. Box 5007, Westport CT 06881.

Quantifying energetics and dissipation in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

We perform a suite of two- and three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations with the Athena code of the non-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the subsonic, weak magnetic field limit. Focusing the analysis on the non-linear turbulent regime, we quantify energy transfer on a scale-by-scale basis and identify the physical mechanisms responsible for energy exchange by developing the diagnostic known as spectral energy transfer function analysis. At late times when the fluid is in a state of MHD turbulence, magnetic tension mediates the dominant mode of energy injection into the magnetic reservoir, whereby turbulent fluid motions twist and stretch the magnetic field lines. This generated magnetic energy turbulently cascades to smaller scales, while being exchanged backwards and forwards with the kinetic energy reservoir, until finally being dissipated. Incorporating explicit dissipation pushes the dissipation scale to larger scales than if the dissipation were entirely numerical. For scales larger than the dissipation scale, we show that the physics of energy transfer in decaying MHD turbulence is robust to numerical effects.Comment: 23 pages, 20 figures, 4 tables, Accepted for publication in MNRA