Categories
Legal ethics

Should racists be permitted to practice law?

This is a question I’ve asked in the past. It is not instinctively an easy question to wrestle with. It can easily boil over into various slippery-slope arguments and accusations regarding risk of inviting concepts of the “thought police” and the like. But another news item invites the question back into the arena for further discussion. This ABA […]

Categories
Legal ethics

“It’s Groundhog Day… again.”

This past week included one of our nation’s most heralded fake holidays. Groundhog’s Day. Silly occasion, but still a really good movie, of course. But, playing off of the theme of repeating events and disappointing outcomes, we return to the oft-discussed topic of lawyers trying to respond to online criticism. We’ve covered in the past […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Just another follow-up Friday.

Yes, if you are about the same age as me, you can sing that title to The Bangles tune of “Just another Manic Monday …” So, this is a weirder follow up post as it follows up on something I posted in October 2021 but involves substantive content that came into existence in July 2021 […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The thing about doing bad things on purpose…

Is that you have to be perfect about it pretty much all of the time. I’m not going to tell you that there are only two kinds of people in the world because I know that kind of thing is only used as the set up to really good jokes. But among the various kinds […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

It’s another fine day to abolish the bar exam.

Now is another of the various times of year throughout the nation when law school graduates finish waiting anxiously for bar results and find out whether they passed and get the opportunity to start digging their way out of the debt they amassed in law school or failed and, thus, have to wrestle with the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The scams evolve. So too must lawyers.

I mentioned in a prior post that I was going to be fortunate enough to preside over the first in-person meeting of APRL in many, many moons last week. I’ve also written in the past about APRL has begun working into its programming items we call “Fred Talks.” These are Focused. Rapid. Ethics. Discussions. Shorter […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Florida is a hopeless place.

No, I’m not going to have to get into talking about that it has a joke of a governor and has been actively trying to not make decisions in the best interest of public health during a crisis. I’m just going to focus on two developments in the legal ethics space that have occurred in […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics

NFT = No From Tennessee

I am about to write a series of statements that are each fairly described as, if you will allow me to use the technical, legal term, “bananas.” People with way too much money on their hands are spending actual money on things called Non-Fungible Tokens (“NFTs”). NFTs are – in laymen’s terms – unique electronic-only […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Brooding about ethics.

So, it’s been a minute or so since my last content. You’ve probably moved on and found a new favorite ethics blog. It’s probably Michael Kennedy’s actually, he’s been relentless with content in March 2021. You might be wondering what has happened to keep me from writing over these last 20 or so days. First, […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics

It’s always easy to get distracted by the cat.

So, if you’re involved in the legal profession, one thing was guaranteed to make it into your email inbox or social media feed or both. And, no, it wasn’t even the atrocious lawyering that was on display in the defense in Washington, D.C. of a former social media influencer. It was undoubtedly the 34 second […]