The Price of Judicial Economy in the US

In the US, courts widely perceive that judicial scarcity is a common problem threatening the fair and timely resolution of disputes. Courts cite the attendant interest in judicial economy to justify interpreting the procedural and substantive law to reduce the judicial workload or accelerate the resolution of cases. But courts’ assumption that there are too few judges to handle the current caseload is hard to substantiate. First, it may not be possible to infer from excessive judicial backlogs or other perceived judicial deficiencies that a shortfall of judges is to blame. Second, even when one confidently perceives that a judicial backlog or other deficiency in a particular US court is attributable to a dearth of judges, one cannot fairly generalize from that example to other US courts and jurisdictions. And third, judgments about judicial deficiencies popularly attributed to the inadequacy of judicial resources may turn on contestable assumptions about judges and adjudication. Given these challenges to measuring the adequacy of judicial resources, one might be skeptical whether judicial economies are worth the costs they impose

Lawyers as Nonlawyers in Child-Custody and Visitation Cases: Questions from the Legal Ethics Perspective Response

The Child Advocacy Clinic at Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington ( Indiana Clinic ) takes as a premise that, in custody and visitation disputes, children may be best served by lawyers as guardians ad litem, rather than by lawyers qua lawyers, on one hand, or by nonlawyer guardians ad litem, on the other. In contrast, participants in a national conference at Fordham Law School\u27 concluded two years ago that [a] lawyer appointed or retained to serve a child in a legal proceeding should serve as the child\u27s lawyer. That is, the lawyer should regard the child as a client, not a ward. Implicit in this recommendation was that, if the court appoints a guardian ad litem ( GAL ) to serve the child, it should assign a nonlawyer to that role. This disagreement raises intertwined questions about how best to serve children in the context of the existing adversary process for making custody and visitation decisions and the prevailing best interest standard by which these decisions are made First, if someone is appointed to represent the child what role should that person play? And, second, to whom should courts assign this role

Foreword

The Urban Environmental Justice symposium took place at Fordham University School of Law, and explored how low-income communities and communities of color in our nation’s cities may have been disproportionately burdened by various environmental harms. It considered what should be done about this problem, from the perspectives of civic and citizens’ groups, the government at the federal, state, and city levels, public interest lawyers, corporations, and others. The participants in the March 3rd program represented a variety of backgrounds and experiences. The keynote speaker, Gerald Torres, Counsel to the United States Attorney General, had only weeks earlier been designated to lead the efforts of the Department of Justice in the area of environmental justice. Speakers who took part in the four discussions that followed included leading legal and non-legal academics, government and public interest lawyers, and civic group leaders. The panel discussions afforded these experts an opportunity to exchange viewpoints with each other and with members of the audience. This book affords those speakers an opportunity to elaborate on the views presented at the symposium

Should There Be a Specialized Ethics Code for Death-Penalty Defense Lawyers

State ethics codes based on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct address lawyers\u27 work in advocacy but do not target lawyers\u27 work in particular areas of advocacy or in other specialized practice areas. For more than forty years, critics have asserted that existing ethics rules are too superficial and should be supplemented by specialized rules. This article examines the utility of specialized ethics rules for one particular sub-specialty-death-penalty defense practice. After identifying arguments for and against a specialized ethics code for death-penalty cases, the article analyzes the arguments in the context of a particular ethics dilemma that some death-penalty defense lawyers have encountered-namely, whether to pursue post-conviction relief on behalf of an ambivalent or unexpressive mentally-ill death-row inmate. The article finds persuasive reasons for courts to develop specialized rules that would provide death-penalty defense lawyers more clarity in how to address this and other ethics dilemmas. Recognizing that courts will likely remain indifferent to the idea of developing specialized ethics rules, however, the article concludes by identifying other ways for courts to mitigate the uncertainties that specialized rules would address