20% of Supreme Court Docket Involved Lawyering Cases in Legal Ethics ‘Revolution’
The U.S. Supreme Court took up 16 cases involving lawyering this past term, amounting to 20 percent of its docket.
The cases fell into two broad categories: access to lawyers, and protection from bad lawyering, Michigan State University law professor Renee Knake tells the National Law Journal. Knake calls the large number of lawyering cases “nothing short of a revolution” in the lawyer ethics field, the NLJ says. Typically the court only decides one to three cases on the topic.
A Bloomberg commentary noted the NLJ story. “So what message are we to take away from the Supreme Court’s rulings on lawyer conduct?” the story asked. “Just this one: The Supreme Court is watching.”
The National Law Journal summarized many of the rulings. They included a mixed bag of “bad lawyering” cases in which the Supreme Court ruled:
• Lawyers have a Sixth Amendment obligation to warn their clients when their guilty pleas can result in deportation. Padilla v. Kentucky.
• The statute of limitations may be tolled when a persistent defendant notified his lawyer of an impending deadline and tried without success to get new counsel because the lawyer was not communicating with him. Holland v. Florida.
• A neo-Nazi death-row inmate was not entitled to have his death sentence overturned on the ground of ineffective assistance of counsel. The defendant’s lawyer had acknowledged his client was “sick,” “twisted” and “demented” but appealed to jurors to be humane. Smith v. Spisak.
The NLJ says six cases fell into the category of access to lawyers, and five were not favorable in terms of encouraging access. They included decisions that held:
• Lawyers are covered by a law that bars debt-relief agencies from advising clients to “incur more debt” in contemplation of bankruptcy, and the statute does not violate the First Amendment when narrowly construed. Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz v. United States.
• Upheld a federal law banning material support for designated terrorist groups, even when the support is for legal activities. Dissenters wondered if the law could bar lawyers from filing an amicus brief on behalf of a terrorist organization. Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.
