Works in Progress Group 9: Professional Responsibility & Pedagogy

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Group 9: Professional Responsibility & Pedagogy 

Thousands of attorneys have experienced rape and sexual assault by clients, as well as unwanted touching, indecent exposure, public masturbation, verbal threats, and stalking by clients. These incidents are not often publicly reported, but sexual violence committed by clients is not uncommon. Yet, sexual violence committed by clients against attorneys does not seem to be contemplated in the current rules of professional conduct in the United States. Nor has it been written about in legal scholarship. This article seeks to start a conversation in that void.

This article critically examines the gendered assumptions inherent in the rules of professional conduct in the United States and begins to explore what type of ethical guidance would be appropriate for attorneys who experience sexual violence committed by clients. I am mindful of avoiding demands to cover or downplay my personal identity in my professional life. Therefore, I also use self-narrative and autoethnographic methods to highlight some of my own experiences practicing law—as a cisgender white woman and abolitionist—and I connect those experiences to my research into ethics and the practice of law.

Imagination, Hope, and Joy: Building Resilience through Trauma-Informed Teaching and Self-Care in Anti-Racist Clinics
Amanda Cole, Georgia State University College of Law
Christina Scott, Georgia State University College of Law

Teaching students to build resilience is necessary to keep imagining and fighting for a path towards social justice. To do so, clinicians can draw from the communities that face the oppression and examine how they remain resilient despite oppression. Recognizing that law school are still predominantly white spaces where law students have a growing lack of faith in the legal system they are asked to uphold, anti-racist and abolitionist classrooms can benefit from examining the joy and imagination of black communities through a multi-lensed approach: community organizing, art, music, poetry and more. Next, trauma-informed lawyering practices can be adapted to clinic classrooms in order to recognize that clinic students face primary trauma caused by the discussions surrounding inherent and structural racism and the inevitable conflict that will arise in classroom dedicated to eradicating it. To combat that trauma, clinicians can engage students in and model self-care to build and preserve the resiliency necessary to move forward with both clinical and professional social justice work. Community self-care is also a necessary, but understudied, component of building a clinic classroom where anti-racism can flourish, and resilience can develop.

Post-Entry Value Drift
Ari Lipsitz, Boston University School of Law

If law school is doing its job, we should expect a graduating law student will retain the values taught as foundational to a successful legal practice upon entry to the profession. However, that is not always what happens. As they enter practice, graduating law students may drift from the values and expectations they developed about the law, absorbing different (or at least differently weighed) values more tailored to the demands of the new attorney's particular career. Building off scholarship on "value drift" within law school, and tying in cognitive psychology research and recent practitioner survey data, I try to make sense of this post-entry value drift. One reason is that lawyers may drift into values aligned with the material interests of their clientele, and thus their careers. This is particularly fascinating in intellectual property, the practice of which is normatively substantive, largely private (and so market-driven), and clustered according to client interests (i.e., certain clients tend to favor stronger or weaker IP). In IP, post-entry value drift may be organized according to a political economy: because the market favors repeat representation, the same practices may tend to serve the same pools of clients, aligning new attorneys into new values. We can measure this alignment based on the drift relative to law students, and in the process try to understand what, exactly, law school is—and isn't—teaching.

Discussant and Moderator: Margaret Drew, University of Massachusetts School of Law - Dartmouth