Reforming Power of Attorney Law to Protect Alaskan Elders from Financial Exploitation

This article discusses the issues arising under the current power of attorney law in Alaska and the impact the law has on Alaskan elders. The Author surveys and summarizes preventative measures set out in the 2006 Uniform Power of Attorney Act (UPOAA), in addition to non-UPOAA reforms adopted in other jurisdictions or suggested by scholars. The Author analyzes the relevance and practicality of the various provisions as applied to Alaska and highlights the major themes that should be considered when reforming the current statute

Can They Work Well on a Team? Assessing Students\u27 Collaborative Skills

[Excerpt] Among the many critiques of legal education are criticisms that law students do not graduate with effective emotional intelligence skills-in particular, they have not learned to work well with others. Working with others is an important legal skill; and as law practice increasingly relies on collaboration among lawyers, legal staff, clients, and other individuals, so have legal employers raised the demand for effective collaborative skills among law students and recent graduates. This essay will focus on ways to engage students in collaborating and assessing that collaboration effectively. Students\u27 interpersonal collaborative skills can be effectively taught and assessed in large doctrinal classes by including effective collaboration as a course learning objective, enlisting students to establish assessment criteria, providing students with multiple opportunities to collaborate, enabling students to get feedback on their skills in working with others, and using students\u27 experiences to gather data about their classmates\u27 skills

The Promise of Client-Centered Professional Norms

In this year’s Saltman Lecture, Jennifer Gerarda Brown and Liana G.T. Wolf argue that restorative justice models have much to offer a broken attorney disciplinary system. While their specific proposals are problematic for reasons discussed more fully in this article, there is considerable merit to the authors’ larger point that the lawyer disciplinary system could benefit from incorporating a greater level of client participation. The authors point to a number of the benefits of a more client-participatory attorney disciplinary system, including the opportunity for lawyers to better appreciate the consequences of their misconduct, the opportunity to focus on repairing the harm done to clients, and the opportunity to restore the public’s faith in the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. This Comment focuses primarily on an additional benefit that might flow from more client-participatory attorney disciplinary proceedings: by opening the disciplinary process to the perspectives of clients, the legal profession gets the opportunity to evolve more client-centered norms of professional conduct

Cloned Meat, Voluntary Food Labeling, and Organic Oreos

[Excerpt] “In December 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had reviewed all the available evidence and was poised to approve meat and milk from cloned animals and their progeny. I remember telling one of my colleagues, a patent law professor, who should be as comfortable with technology as anyone, about this development, and his response was, “Yuck. I’m not eating it!” To which of course I replied, “Humph. You won’t know the difference.” Meat or milk from a clone or its descendant is virtually identical to meat or milk from a non-clone, said the FDA, as it also announced that it would almost certainly not require food from clones to be labeled. Consumers often want information about where their food came from or about the processes employed in producing it. The food identity approach to labeling cannot take process into account unless the process affects the identity of the food. When the process does not change the food in any material way, process information on a label might suggest a difference that does not exist. The instinctive “yuck” to the thought of cloned meat highlights the tension between consumer preferences, the government’s science-based, food identity approach, and producers’ efforts to differentiate their products. Part I of this article identifies three functions that labels perform, outlines the types of information usually required, and introduces the rule that voluntary label information cannot be misleading. Part II focuses on process information and its implications. I argue that there is no truly voluntary labeling when consumers care about a feature; if some products are labeled, then unlabeled products bear a de facto label by implication. Partly because of the de facto mandatory labeling principle, process labeling has the potential to mislead consumers. In Part III, I examine some relevant characteristics of consumers. I argue that not all consumers can be misled by label information. Consumers who have no preferences or who are very knowledgeable about the labeled feature are not misled by process labeling. Finally, using labeling of genetically modified (GM) ingredients as an example, I suggest that mandatory labeling of some process information could enhance consumer sovereignty and welfare.

Engaged Client-Centered Representation and the Moral Foundations of the Lawyer-Client Relationship

The field of legal ethics, as we know it today, has grown out of thoughtful, systematic grounding of lawyers’ duties in a comprehensive understanding of lawyers’ roles and the situating of lawyers’ roles in underlying theories of law, morality, and justice. Unfortunately, in the process, the field of theoretical legal ethics has mostly lost track of the thing that Freedman insisted was at the heart of a lawyers’ role: the integrity of the lawyer-client relationship. As I will discuss, the field of theoretical legal ethics has developed in ways that are deeply lawyer-centered rather than fundamentally client-centered. I am going to speak about how that happened. I am also going to share some of my ideas about what it would mean to ground a fundamentally client-centered conception of lawyers’ duties to represent a client zealously within the bounds of the law in moral, political, and jurisprudential theory

A Comment on Restatement Third of Torts’ Proposed Treatment of the Liability of Possessors of Land

In §§ 51 and 52 of the forthcoming second volume of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm, the reporters have sought to accommodate the trend to extend the liability of possessors of land to trespassers. The courts that have led the way in this legal transformation of the traditional common law have largely focused on the foreseeability of the trespasser and of the likelihood of injury from the disrepair of the premises. The Restatement (Third) takes a different approach by focusing on the flagrancy of the trespass, a concept with significant moral connotations. I argue that this approach has severe problems. The notion of flagrancy conjures up at least two overlapping visions. One is the purpose of the trespasser in committing the trespass, such as whether to commit a crime. The other is the frequency of the trespass; the more frequent the trespass the more foreseeable it is to the possessor of the premises. But since frequency, after a point, shows a total disregard of the rights of the possessor, it can lead to the conclusion that, what would have been an actionable injury, is now without a remedy because of the flagrant disregard of the rights of the possessor. Moreover, by focusing on the moral culpability of the injured trespasser, it requires juries and courts to make moral judgments with large subjective components. This possibility is recognized by the reporters in their explicit recognition and expectation that different jurisdictions might have different notions of what is \u27flagrant.\u27 Whether a restatement of the law that accepts that different states will look at things differently is actually a \u27restatement\u27 is a matter that deserves serious consideration

The Internationalization of Agency Actions

U.S. agencies routinely base their domestic regulations on international considerations, such as the benefits of coordinating American and foreign standards or the foreign policy advantages of a particular policy. I refer to this phenomenon as the internationalization of agency actions. This Article examines what the internationalization of agency actions means for agency decision-making processes, institutional design, and legal doctrine. It creates a stylized model of how agencies determine whether to coordinate their standards with foreign regulations. Among other institutional design findings, it shows that court opinions that reduce the stringency of judicial review when agencies implement internationally coordinated standards make such coordination more likely to occur, but they simultaneously deprive the executive of bargaining power because U.S. agencies cannot credibly threaten that any coordinated agreement must align more closely with U.S. values or risk being overturned in U.S. courts. This Article also develops a taxonomy of international factors relied on by agencies and applies that taxonomy to help clarify the doctrinal issue of whether and when agencies can use international factors to justify their actions in court. This taxonomical approach shows how the Supreme Court’s opinion in Massachusetts v. EPA can reasonably be read to allow agencies to invoke a far broader range of foreign policy rationales than some prevailing views suggest