Can that be a thing?
I’ve fallen down on the job of being a reliable blogger and I’m not sure I’m getting up any time soon.
I think I’ve continued to manage to be a decent lawyer, pretty good expert witness, okay husband, mediocre father, and generally non-evil human being. But I’m failing as a blogger lately.
I have decent intentions. I can’t prove that, but you’ll just have to trust me. But when I try to carve out the time, I stray to the world of constant information of the Internet and wallow in the notion that 150,000 people in the United States have died now and so, so, so very many of them did not have to if we had even halfway decent leadership in our nation. And, it doesn’t look like it is getting better any time soon.
So, here’s three short entries about three topics I’ve written about in the past and that are back in the consciousness of, at least me, but also I think the legal news world.
Remember when, as lawyers in the United States, we were worried about protecting client information in connection with international travel?
Hey, remember when lawyers in the United States could travel internationally?
Yeah, good times.
Well, very briefly to reset the discussion to back in the before-times, things were maybe looking up and it looked like privileged and confidential information possessed by lawyers might be protected in connection with border crossings. Here’s a link to an ABA Journal story that indicates that things may not actually be looking up really at all. At least not as long as the current regime remains in charge.
So, topic the second, states are still trying to figure out how to allow the law school graduates of 2020 to demonstrate that they can be admitted into the practice of law. I wrote some about what Tennessee was going to do, and chided a little bit about how signs were pointing toward trying to go to diploma privilege was probably a better answer. Since then, Tennessee has cancelled its rescheduled in-person bar exam and instead will have an online only exam in October 2020. Better. Still not willing to allow for diploma privilege as the answer though.
On a not unrelated point, Michigan was one of the first states pursuing the online only bar exam option to move forward this week, and it did not go very well. Tech problems. Caused apparently by a DDOS attack. Good thing there is no reason to think those might happen in other states. Oh, also, Indiana has been trying to do one online and announced it will instead have an emailed bar exam.
And, finally, the ABA recently issued a Formal Ethics Opinion designed to try to lay to rest ongoing concerns about what the scope of ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) is and what it does and does not restrict. You might recall 8.4(g) which was adopted almost exactly 4 years ago by the ABA and has been adopted almost nowhere else since. (You might recall it from when I used to write about it Hamilton-style (“non stop“).) It is a good advocacy piece. Probably better than the advocacy pieces that the ABA had available when it first passed the rule. It is not a good ethics opinion exactly though because it doesn’t really do any of the things you would expect an ethics opinion to do. You can read it here.
But, I mean, have you looked at the world around us?
I don’t think a well-reasoned explanation of why states could adopt ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) and not be concerned that they would somehow be restricting cherished liberties is going to gain much traction whether it looks like a traditional ethics opinion or an outright advocacy piece.
So, I mean, why not just try an advocacy piece, I guess?
Sigh.
(P.S. Given that the only prior Taylor Swift album I liked was the one Ryan Adams did as a cover… I never expected I’d be saying how incredibly good a Taylor Swift album is, but here we are. folklore is fantastic. And it isn’t fantastic just because I love The National and Bon Iver. Ms. Swift’s got incredible talent, a very lovely voice, and wrote some really good and poignant lyrics.)
(P.P.S. It is a really good, really good album as is. But I also can totally imagine every single song (except Exile [for obvious reasons]) also being excellent if sung by Matt Berninger. I’m thinking that’s a feature not a bug.)