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Class Not Race in Legal Ethics: Or Why Hierarchy Makes Strange Bedfellows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

David B. Wilkins
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Extract

Susan Carle has given us a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and well-argued examination of the early history of the modern civil rights movement. She frames her inquiry of this rarely investigated period in terms of the tension between the NAACP's litigation tactics during the early part of the twentieth century and the professed ethics of the establishment lawyers who authored and approved these controversial measures. How, she asks, could leading corporate lawyers such as Charles Boston justify authorizing the NAACP's concerted campaign to solicit plaintiffs and create test cases while at the same time serving on ethics committees that expressly condemned such practices?

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 2002 , pp. 147 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2002

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References

1. Auerbach, Jerold S., Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

2. Model Rules for Professional Conduct, MR 7.3(a) (prohibiting solicitation “when a significant motive for the lawyer's doing so is the lawyer's pecuniary gain”).

3. See In re Primus, 436 U.S. 412 (1978).

4. For example, a study of New York University law school graduates found that students with the highest grades were disproportionately more likely than their peers in the middle and bottom of the class to begin their careers in public interest organizations. See Kornhauser, Lewis A. and Revesz, Richard L., “Legal Education and Entry into the Legal Profession: The Role of Race, Gender, and Educational Debt,” New York University Law Review 70 (1995): 829–909Google Scholar.

5. Indeed, in one of the more ironic aspects of the connection between the corporate and public interest bars, elite firms now frequently employ for the benefit of their powerful clients many of the techniques pioneered by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to give their powerless clients access to the power of law. Thus, corporate lawyers routinely counsel corporate clients to solicit industry-wide cooperation, to pursue a coordinated litigation strategy, and to bring “test cases” challenging various regulatory measures.