Traversing the Ethical Minefield

📖 The Scoop

This casebook offers students accessible, teachable, and insightful primary material, problems, and notes that clarify and encourage analysis of the law governing lawyers. The book’s innovative pedagogy uses a combination of problems faced by fictitious law firm “Martyn and Fox,” cases, ethics opinions, notes, and tables to support its focus on teaching the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers and invite consideration of lawyer ethical dilemmas. The book’s manageable length makes it short enough to provide focus, but long enough to convey the rich texture of the subject.

New to the Fifth Edition:

• New co-authors Profs. Ana Pottratz Acosta and Ashley M. London bring to this edition their combined years of legal practice, clinical legal education, expertise in legal analysis, and classroom pedagogy.
• Expanded coverage of agency law and fiduciary duties, along with new and updated cases, ethics opinions, problems, notes, and tables.
• 6 new court decisions, including In re Giuliani (summary disbarment) and King v. Whitmer (frivolous lawsuit sanctions).
• 8 new ethics opinions address contemporary issues, such as e-lawyering, client fraud on administrative agencies and courts, lawyer-directors and entity clients, immigration, and representing fiduciary clients who harm beneficiaries.
• 16 “Afterwords” provide students with additional information about the parties and the subsequent impact of cases.

Professors and students will benefit from:

• Comprehensive coverage of a wide range of ethical issues and remedies through a combination of 138 short problems, 55 cases, 16 afterwords, 13 ethics opinions, 13 tables, and explanatory notes throughout that showcase and clarify the law governing lawyers.
• Student-accessible, teachable problems encourage nuanced explorations of the Model Rules, Restatement, cases, and materials, suited to both large- and small-classes.
• Thematic notes introduce students to sources and content of the law governing lawyers and commentary about the legal profession organized around recurring themes: 
  • Lawyers’ Roles (lawyers who suffer consequences by under- or over-identifying with clients and those who avoid these dangers)
  • The Law Governing Lawyers (professional discipline, tort liability, and equitable remedies, including undue influence presumptions, constructive trusts, fee forfeiture, disqualification, injunctive relief, and procedural sanctions)
  • The Bounds of the Law (the rules of professional conduct, court orders, fraud, crime, and applicable statutes)
  • Lawyers and Clients (ethics issues arising in specific client representations, such as pro bono, criminal and insurance defense, organizations, and governments)
• Text is short enough to cover in a typical course but detailed enough to provide thorough treatment of the issues at hand.
• Annual supplement including Model Rules, Restatement, and Code of Judicial Conduct.

Genre: Law / Ethics & Professional Responsibility (fancy, right?)