Professional Responsibility and the Legal Profession

For a complete list of course offerings in Professional Responsibility and the Legal Profession, including full descriptions and faculty who will be teaching the offerings in 2008-2009, refer to the online Curriculum Guide.

Professional Responsibility includes the law and principles that govern the practice of lawyering. A basic reference point is the set of lawyer disciplinary codes developed by bar associations and adopted by courts. However, these rules co-exist with a growing body of common law and statutory liability rules that regulate lawyering. The Sarbanes-Oxley coprorate accountability legislation, recent amendments to the tax code on tax shelters, criminal obstruction of justice statues, the common law of fraud and the anti-fraud provisions of the securities law all bear importantly on lawyers. All these doctrines make up the "law of lawyering." The most pervasive issues pertain to the trade-off between duties of client confidentiality and duties of candor or disclosure to non-clients. Other topics typically considered are conflicts of interest and restraints on the organization of law firms and the marketing of legal services. Some of the issues treated in the course arise virtually daily in practice -- for example, conflicts of interest; others arise less frequently but often involve enormous stakes when they do -- for example, client fraud. Debates about professional responsibility are often animating by competing conceptions about the general role of the lawyer in the legal system and the nature of the adversary system, and these debates are considered in the courses.