What bar ethics restrictions are there on lawyers commenting on current legal cases? In the United States, what bar ethics restrictions are there on lawyers publicly commenting on ongoing legal cases in which they represent no parties? Since different state bars might have different rules, my question could be expanded to: In general, what are the restrictions? Which states have the most extreme restrictions, and how do they differ from the general restrictions? Which states have the most lax restrictions, and how do they differ from the general restrictions? EDIT: At what point does an uninvolved lawyer's public commentary on a case constitute a legal opinion which, according to ethics rules, requires due diligence to be done by the uninvolved lawyer? At what point does the due diligence needed become so great that it can only be done someone with access to non-public information, and thus the uninvolved lawyer is certainly violating ethic rules? [NOTE: This isn't my understanding of bar ethics rules, but that of someone I'm arguing with.]
As George White says, it's hard to prove a negative, but in this instance, there's quite a bit of evidence supporting you. First, the ABA has standards for legal commentators but they are very weak. They say pretty much what you would expect, and, they are non-binding: they explicitly say they &quot;not intended&quot; to provide grounds for &quot;professional discipline.&quot; Second, there are articles by lawyers indicating there are no state bar standards. Taken together, the weak ABA standards and the articles should give you enough evidence to prove your case in the &quot;court of buddy opinion.&quot; The ABA rules on legal commentators were issued in 2013 as part of a Fair Trial and Public Discourse Black Letter. The letter covered public comments on cases by lawyers involved in the case, lawyers not involved (ie, commentators) and judicial and judicial employees. According to the ABA, the standards are: intended to provide a guide to best practices for lawyers who provide public commentary or consult on criminal cases in which they are not personally involved; (Standard 8-1.1(a)(ii)) To explain what it meant by a &quot;guide to best practices,&quot; the ABA included the following caveat about the applicability of the standards: While these Standards are intended to provide a basis for the formulation of internal guidelines within lawyers’ offices...they are not intended to serve as the basis in and of themselves for the imposition of professional discipline...(Standard 8-1.1(c)) In other words, the ABA's rules truly are just a guide to best practices. As for the guidance itself, it does not come close to requiring &quot;due-diligence.&quot; A lawyer who is serving as a legal commentator should strive to ensure that the lawyer’s commentary enhances the public’s understanding of the criminal matter and of the criminal justice system generally, promotes respect for the judicial system, and does not materially prejudice the fair administration of justice, in the particular case or in general. To that end, a legal commentator should: (i) Have an understanding of the law and facts of the matter so as to be competent to serve as a commentator; (ii) Refrain from providing commentary designed to sensationalize a criminal matter; and... It may be that some states provide more stringent restrictions, but a quick search suggests they don't. Otherwise, there would not be a law review article arguing &quot;The Legal Profession Must Broaden Ethical Standards for Legal Commentators,&quot; or an ABA Journal article (from this June) giving advice on becoming a legal commentator without mentioning state bar restrictions. I'm sure if you look, you can find more evidence.
england-and-wales No. This type of approach is a breach of the Solicitors Regulation Authority's (SRA) Code of Conduct for solicitors, Registered European Lawyers, and Registered Foreign Lawyers Paragraph 8.9 of the Code states that: You do not make unsolicited approaches to members of the public, with the exception of current or former clients, in order to advertise legal services provided by you, or your business or employer. This requirement is clarified by SRA Guidance that says: ...advertising to the public is permitted, subject to certain conditions... ... Specifically, you are allowed to advertise your services to the public so long as this is done in a non-intrusive and non-targeted way. This means, for example, that you may place an advert on the radio or TV, on billboards, in a local newspaper, online or on a social media platform. However, this advertising is limited... Paragraphs 8.9 and 7.1(c)1 of the Standards and Regulations prohibit unsolicited approaches to members of the public which, even if permitted by law, may feel unwelcome or intrusive. ... This means you cannot make direct or specifically targeted &quot;approaches&quot; to members of the public in person, by phone or via other means which target them individually. (My emphasis) This guidance goes on to give an example of prohibited advertising of the sort suggested by the OP: Firm A identifies from online media a list of people who have recently been involved in a major road traffic accident. The firm sends them a letter saying that it can help claim compensation. We [i.e. the SRA] would consider this a breach of our standards as it involves a targeted approach to specific members of the public which may feel intrusive to those who receive it due to the particular circumstances that they find themselves in. 1Paragraph 7.1 (c) of the Code of Conduct for Firms applies the same standard to firms.
There is nothing wrong with this requirement. The teacher or professor isn't requiring you to change your opinion. Instead, the requirement is simply to marshall evidence in favor of an opinion that you may not hold. Being able to do this is a valuable rhetorical skill (and a skill which lawyers must routinely employ). For example, in competitive debate, you often do not have the freedom to decide whether you will be arguing in favor or against a resolution, and may not even know which side you will be advancing until moments before the event starts. Freedom of conscience does not extend to freedom from understanding people who disagree with your deeply held belief. UPDATE: Requiring a whole classroom of students (possibly many classrooms of students) to advocate with multiple representatives for a bill does seem problematic, in terms of election laws and probably in terms of the legal requirements that apply to the university, and also possibly in terms of "forced speech", because in requiring the advocacy to be submitted to the official and take a particular position, goes beyond the "let's pretend" veneer that applies in most debate contexts.
The dichotomy between solicitors and barristers in the UK isn't one based on verbal definitions in the English language. In other words, the fact that barristers argue and solicitors don't isn't something that's inherent to the words, it's just how British law decided to divide it. Since those countries with solicitor generals don't have this dichotomy, they generally don't have anything actually called a barrister, and there's no reason why the solicitor general couldn't be called that, since solicitor doesn't require that he not argue in court.
It has been along-standing principle in the US that names of jurors are publicly known, although there can be exceptions (US v. Barnes, 604 F.2d 121 (1979) is the first case of a fully anonymous jury. Now, except in the 10th Circuit, they are allowed and not extremely rare (I don't know what the percentage is). So it would depend on whether the particular jury list is public. Apart from the situation where a juror is harassed by the press and gets a court order to restrain approaches by a specific member of the press, if you can contact them, you can ask them questions. There cannot be a blanket "do not contact a juror" law / order in the US, which would be contrary to the 1st Amendment.
This depends entirely on STATE law, and you need to list the state(s) you are interested in in the question. Thus, the usual legal statement "it depends." POLICE ARE NOT ATTORNEYS Don't accept legal advice from the police at face value. Police frequently don't actually know the minutiae of the law, and/or often misunderstand it. Their job is not to provide legal advice nor legal judgement, their job is to enforce the law based on certain priorities. Thus the area of enforcement is usually narrowed to specific categories so they can be experts in that area. (I.e vice cops, bunko squad, homicide division, etc.) But police are not lawyers, so don't expect them to understand the law. They did not attend 3 years of law school after attaining a college degree, which lawyers DO. Police get as little as 3 months training (in some states like Arkansas they can be put on duty without ANY training for up to a year (!) before attending the academy). THAT SAID, REGARDING CALL RECORDINGS: There are single and two party states. In single party states, any single person who is part of a call or communication can record it. In "two party" states, everyone that is part of the call must be informed. There are numerous exceptions and stipulations however. GREAT EXPECTATIONS First off, is there an "expectation of privacy." Again this varies by state and case law. Generally, if there is no expectation of privacy, then there is a clear exception to record. For instance, if you are in a busy restaurant, and people around you can hear or eavesdrop, you have no expectation of privacy. Courts have also ruled that if you are in the presence of a police officer performing official duties, there is also no expectation of privacy (not for either of you). IS IT LIVE OR IS IT MEMOREX Are you being recorded? If you are in a two/all party state, and you have an expectation of privacy (a phone call made in your home) then one of the following must occur: If the police are recording you without your knowledge, they must have a court order permitting them to do so as part of an investigation. Otherwise you must be notified with a statement at the beginning of the call that the call is being recorded. (Typically your option is to hang up or continue. Continuing the call implies your consent.) In some states the notification can be in the form of a "duck" or a beep every 15 seconds (time period varies, this is also different per state). OPINION NOT ADVICE BELOW I would think that being notified that a call is being recorded ends any expectation of privacy for any involved party. Assuming the state law and related case law supports recording when there is no expectation of privacy, this circumstance would seem to permit recording legally. Doubly so if your were talking to police in official capacity (did you notice a beep every xx seconds?) CAUTION: Because this varies so much by state, and because even the various Federal District Courts are not in unanimous agreement on the minutiae, there may be other factors to consider.
If a defendant has committed a crime, they would choose to self-represent to ensure that no one else would know about the circumstances of their crime. Although lawyers are ethically bound to not disclose information that would not be in the interest of their client, the decision to breach this duty would be up to the sole discretion of the individual in question. In cases where the exchanged information may used to provide evidence against the client, the lawyer is compelled to disclose the truth to the courts/law enforcement. This is deeply misguided. Criminal defense lawyers usually represent people who are guilty and there is no ethical problem with doing so, nor does this mean that the lawyer will disclose privileged information that is prejudicial to the defendant in the course of the representation. The notion that a lawyer would be compelled to testify against his client to the courts/law enforcement is simply not how the system works. It is true that a lawyer cannot ethically put you on the stand to offer testimony when the lawyer knows that your testimony to the court will be an outright flat lie, and that this lie is your strategy to prevail in your defense, but that is the sole meaningful limitation on what a lawyer can do for you. However, I can't think of a single instance, in which a desire to defend yourself at trial with a lie has caused someone to represent themselves. Usually, someone with that kind of motive will simply lie to their lawyer as well. It never makes sense to represent yourself if you are innocent and want to be acquitted of the charges against you. But, keep in mind that this is a small subset of all criminal defendants. Criminal defendants are overwhelmingly guilty of something. Usually, a criminal defense lawyer works to either exploit prosecution mistakes or lack of knowledge that prevent the prosecution from proving that guilt, or work to make sure that the defendant is not convicted of a more serious crime than the one committed, and/or work to see to it that their client does not receive an unnecessarily harsh sentence when alternatives are available. In real life, people represent usually themselves, either because they are denied access to counsel (which can be done in a criminal cases where the prosecutor waives the right to seek incarceration as a sentence), or because they are "crazy". Many people who represent themselves in a criminal cases do so because they want to proudly claim that they committed the crime as a means of obtaining of forum for public recognition of what they believe was righteous action even if this could lead to their death. Many terrorists, domestic and foreign, fall into this category. For example, the fellow committed a massacre at a Colorado abortion clinic tried to do this (if I recall correctly, he was later found incompetent to face a trial and has been committed to a mental institution until he becomes competent, if ever). Other people represent themselves out of a strongly felt guilt that they feel a moral duty to confess to, even if this means that they will face severe punishment for doing so. One subset of this group of people are people known as "death penalty volunteers" who try to get sentenced to death and try to waive all appeals and post-trial review. Sometimes they also plead guilty in the belief (often, but not always, inaccurate) that their swift guilty plea when they aren't actually guilty will protect someone else whom they know to be actually guilty. Other people represent themselves because they have deeply held, but paranoid and inaccurate views about the legal system such as members of the "Sovereign Citizens Movement" who think that if they say the "magic words" that they cannot be convicted and that lawyers are a part of a conspiracy designed to prevent them from doing so. Another situation that comes up is when an affluent person who is not entitled to a public defender as a result, chooses to represent themselves, usually with respect to a fairly minor charge like a traffic violation that carries a risk for a short term of incarceration, to save money. But, this is rarely a wise choice. But, unless you plan on pleading guilty or being found guilty at trial, self-representation does not make sense, and even if you plan on pleading guilty, a lawyer is usually worth it. For example, even if the direct consequence of a guilty plea is minor, the collateral consequences of that conviction (e.g. loss of eligibility to work in certain jobs and/or deportation and/or loss of a right to own a firearm) may be consequential and something that a non-lawyer would not realize was happening. Or, maybe you think you are guilty of crime X so there is no point in fighting the charges, but actually, the language of that statute has been defined in a manner that means you are really only guilty of less serious crime Y.
If the patent lawyer &quot;hears about&quot; such failed patents from clients, and then uses the client's work and modifies them into successful patent filings, that would seem to be a clear conflict of interest, just as a business lawyer cannot use info learned from a client to make his own business deals, unless the client grants an OK. But if the patent lawyer just hears through shoptalk, or through communication by, perhaps, patent examiners that the lawyer works with, I don't see any conflict of interest, although as the comment by Eugene Styer suggests, there is likely to be enough prior art to make the patent invalid.