“The Ethical Lawyer” has moved.
I now publish from my own site at www.tarullilaw.com/ethicallawyer. Please update your feedreaders and bookmarks – your readership is always appreciated.
Also, if your interests lie along the lines of insurance litigation, have a look at my (nascent) insurance law blog at www.tarullilaw.com/insurancelawyer.
See you there!
I ran across a case recently, which brought to mind the way that the legal profession is perceived by the public. The case is Whelan v. Beothic General Insurance Co., [1992] N.J. No. 336 (T.D.).
The facts of the case are simple: Mr. Whelan’s teenaged daughters set out to make some French fries. They put some cooking fat into a large pot and put the pot on their electric stove, leaving the burner turned fully on. Then they went upstairs to their room and started fixing their hair, forgetting completely about the fat on the stove.
This seems to have been a novel, if misguided attempt on the part of a trial judge to save the Georgia legal aid system some money, and move a somewhat slow moving criminal case to trial expeditiously.
News that Bay Street law firm Borden Ladner Gervais, and partner George Hunter are being sued by Mr. Hunter’s former client over a “romantic/sexual” affair he had with her in 2003 raises, once again, the thorny ethical issue of whether lawyers should be allowed to maintain this type of relationship with a client. Mr. Hunter plead guilty to charges of professional misconduct in February 2007, and was suspended from practice for 60 days.
What makes this case interesting is that at the same time he carried on the affair over which he is now being sued, Mr. Hunter sat on a disciplinary panel for the Law Society of Upper Canada that also dealt with allegations of sexual involvement between another Ontario lawyer and that lawyer’s client. That lawyer was disbarred.
It appears that Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Gary Lunn, has dismissed Linda J. Keen from her position as President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (”CNSC”).
As I indicated in a previous posting, although administrative tribunals in Canada enjoy only the degree of institutional independence that their enabling statute grants them, my analysis for the CNSC is that it is entitled to significant independence, considering that its enabling statute refers to it as “… a court of record”. Also significant is the fact that its work deals with serious public safety issues, and its membership is employs specialized knowledge.
That degree of institutional independence imposes on tribunal members an obligation to reject any attempt at influencing its decision making in particular cases before the Commission. Ms. Keen carried out that obligation well, and her efforts have now been rewarded with the loss of her presidency on the tribunal, although she remains a member.
This government’s handling of the affair undermines public confidence in the workings of administrative tribunals, and sends a troubling message not only to the members of other administrative tribunals, but to every party with proceedings pending before them. The potential damage to the administration of justice before these tribunals should not be underestimated.
Linda Keen’s response to Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn’s recent dealings with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission over the National Research Universal (NRU) nuclear reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, raises 2 very interesting questions about quasi-judicial tribunals in Canada:
1. Just how much independence can one expect from an administrative tribunal?
2. How far should members of an administrative tribunal go to protect that independence?
This, from Above the Law and Legal Blog Watch: The Chicago law firm of Fetman Garland & Associates has been generating some controversy with its “Life is Short – Get a Divorce” ad campaign.
Corri Fetman, one of the partners in the firm, is reportedly the female in the advertising photographs, and is now apparently writing a regular column for Playboy magazine on “Love and the Law”.
Carolyn Elefant’s criticism on Legal Blog Watch centers around her perception of whether the campaign will be effective at attracting clients. That misses the point.
There is an excerpt from a video deposition that has been making the rounds on YouTube for about the last year or so, that a lot of people seem to find funny. I am not one of them.
I suppose the custom would be for me to link to it, but I am not going to do that. I am not doing it because typically, most jurisdictions have rules that say that evidence obtained in a lawsuit during the discovery process cannot be used for any collateral purpose. How the video made it onto the internet, assuming that rule is operative in the state from which it originates, raises a whole series of other troubling questions. In any event, my view is that it would be a violation of that rule for me to further distribute the video.
Nevertheless, the disturbing content is a good case for ethical analysis.
