Hot Topics in the Legal Profession - 2012

Book excerpt: Current important events in the U.S. legal profession and legal ethics, with useful research and analysis of the rules and the profession's current status, are explored by Tulane law students from an advanced ethics seminar. The collection is edited by Tulane legal ethics professor Steven Alan Childress, and he previews in his Foreword the students' explorations of the big stories of 2011. Purchase of this book benefits Tulane's Public Interest Law Foundation, a nonprofit student group that funds public interest placements and indigent client representations throughout the country. The timely topics include: prosecutorial relationships with public defenders, bar discipline for behavior outside the practice of law, false guilty pleas, the capital defense of Jared Loughner, Justice Scalia's seminar for conservative congressmembers, sensitivity to "cultural competence," legal outsourcing and competition, the dilemma of student debt in a slowed legal economy, the practice of law by legal websites like LegalZoom, and the advocate-witness rule.