Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
August went too fast! In the time since we were last in touch, I’ve traveled to Chicago to attend my first meeting as a member of the Council for the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar where, among other things, we formally adopted accreditation goals and values. (For a recap of the meeting, see here.) And I spent the Labor Day holiday weekend in NYC with my kids who caught tennis matches and a baseball game while I checked out new yoga studios. (Shoutout to Aura Yoga on the Upper West Side – a must if you’re there, especially on a Sunday morning!)
Since this is the first Monday I’m posting during September, you get a “First Monday Edition” even though technically it is the second Monday of the month. Let’s dive in!
Highlights from the Past Few Weeks – Top Ten Headlines
#1. “Jack Smith’s Legal Team Fires Back Against Ethics Complaint.” From the New York Times: “Lawyers for Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump, have struck back for the first time against some of the accusations conservatives have leveled against him, denouncing an ethics complaint as ‘imaginary and unfounded.’ For months, Mr. Smith has remained silent as the president and some of his senior advisers, including top Justice Department officials, publicly attacked him, accusing Mr. Smith of engaging in wrongdoing for overseeing two criminal inquiries and indictments of Mr. Trump. The investigations involved whether Mr. Trump mishandled classified documents after he left office as well as his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On Monday, Mr. Smith’s legal team sent a letter to the Office of Special Counsel, which has no affiliation with Mr. Smith’s former position. The Office of Special Counsel conducts ethics investigations of government employees, primarily into whether people have violated the Hatch Act, which bars federal workers from using their jobs to work on behalf of a political campaign.” Read more here.
#2 “L.A. Judge Who Threatened to Shoot People in His Courtroom Admonished by State Panel.” From the LA Times: “A state judicial panel publicly admonished Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Enrique Monguia for threatening to shoot people in his courtroom. The judge made other inappropriate remarks, including suggesting one woman would raise a ‘meth baby’ and labeling a prospective juror a ‘hot mess.’ Monguia acknowledged wrongdoing and expressed remorse.” Read more here.
#3 “Trial for Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in immigration case set for Dec. 15.” From the Milwaukee Sentinel: “Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan will be tried Dec. 15 on federal criminal charges accusing her of obstructing immigration agents trying to arrest an undocumented Mexican migrant outside her courtroom earlier this year. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman set the trial date in the high-stakes case at a seven-minute hearing in the federal courthouse on Sept. 3. The trial is expected to last a week.” Read more here.
#4 “DOJ Permits Attorneys Without Immigration Case Experience to be Temporary Judges Amid Major Backlog.” From Fox News: “In an apparent effort to address the millions of backlogged immigration cases, the Justice Department made a rule change to allow attorneys without immigration law experience to act as temporary immigration judges. The DOJ’s Office of Immigration Review published the rule in the federal register Thursday, which removes the requirement that temporary immigration judges have substantive prior experience in immigration law. Jurists who are approved by Attorney General Pam Bondi may serve as immigration judges, which represents a tide change after more than 100 judges were fired or bought out by the Trump administration earlier in 2025.” Read more here.
#5 “Court Extends Suspension of 98-Year-Old US Circuit Judge Newman.” From Reuters: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday adopted a recommendation to extend the suspension of the court’s longest-serving judge for another year after determining that she had not complied with an internal investigation into her fitness to serve. The Federal Circuit’s Judicial Council, consisting of the court’s active judges, said it would continue the suspension of 98-year-old Pauline Newman as long as she refuses to take a proposed battery of neurological tests.” Read more here.
# 6. “New Firm Seeks to Confront Trump on Executive Power.” From the New York Times: “Cathy A. Harris learned she was fired for a third time during her daughter’s high school graduation. It was a gut punch, she said, on what was meant to be a happy occasion. The former chairwoman of an obscure but critical panel that mediates federal employee discipline, Ms. Harris was among an early slate of federal employees President Trump fired without cause. She sued the administration and went through four months of employment limbo before the Supreme Court ordered that she remain fired while her case wound through the legal system. … As she carves a path expected to lead back to the Supreme Court, she has added a new law firm to her team of lawyers. The four-lawyer firm, called the Washington Litigation Group, is the latest to join a coterie of pro bono organizations that have emerged in recent months to challenge the Trump administration, which is already facing about 375 lawsuits, according to The Times’s latest count.” Read more here (gift link).
#7 “‘Virtually All of Us Are Committed’ to SCOTUS’s Ethics Code, Justice Sotomayor Tells Swiss Audience in Newly Unearthed Audio.” From Fix the Court: “At a July 11, 2024, appearance at the University of Zurich, Justice Sotomayor offered insights on ethics codes and term limits proposals that she’s not given stateside, owning up to a ‘mistake’ she made — first identified by Fix the Court — by not recusing in a petition and highlighting the positives for ending life tenure at SCOTUS. In what might have been the most telling comment of the event, Sotomayor said that ‘virtually all of us (justices) are committed’ to the Court’s new ethics code, albeit without specifying what she meant by ‘virtually.’ Unfortunately, there was no follow up question to that comment.” Read more here.
#8 “A Florida Judge Tried To Strip Me Of My Law License.” From Let’s Address This with Qasim Rashid: “It all started when a Florida Chief Judge filed a formal bar complaint against me for my alleged ‘misconduct’ of criticizing an unjust judicial ruling on my Substack and Twitter. On May 12th I received a daunting First-Class mail letter, the likes of which I had never before received. An official warning from the Virginia State Bar (‘VSB’) informing me that a Judge had filed a bar and ethics complaint against me. The complaint called on the VSB to investigate me and determine, effectively, whether I should be allowed to continue to practice law. I read the sentence repeatedly, hoping each time I had misread what was obvious. Worse, I only had 21 days to respond. For context—between undergrad, LSAT prep, law school, and working as a licensed attorney, I have invested 25 years of my life into my legal career. And now, I risked losing 25 years of my life in just 21 days. The complaint came from Francis J. Allman, Chief Judge of Florida’s Second Judicial District. (NOTE: No one reading this should attempt to contact him or address him for any reason. That is not what I seek, nor will it help me in any way). But now I was even more confused. I am licensed to practice law in Illinois and in Virginia. I have never appeared before any judge in Florida, much less handled any Florida case or client. Why was a Florida Judge filing an attorney misconduct claim against an Illinois based attorney by going after my Virginia law license?” Read more here.
#9 “OnlyFans’ Parent Says AI-Tainted Briefs Are Unsalvageable.” From Law360: “The online platform OnlyFans’ parent company said that a bid to correct legal briefs in a proposed class action against the company should be denied, arguing that the decision to uses artificial intelligence to create mistake-riddled documents is severe misconduct and the briefs should be struck instead.” Read more here.
#10 “Legal Complicity and the Futile Dream of Resistance.” From Sida Liu (University of Hong Kong) in JOTWELL reviewing Jedidiah Kroncke’s (University of Hong Kong) article Legal Complicity in an Age of Resurgent Authoritarianism, 38 Geo. J. Legal Ethics ___ (forthcoming 2025): “As authoritarianism gains momentum globally, the rule-of-law ideal is increasingly compromised. Lawyers are confronting a wave of attacks, ranging from the persecution of human rights advocates and the restriction of criminal defenders to the suppression of corporate law firms, including some of the most prestigious ones worldwide. Recent actions by the U.S. government against elite law firms like Paul Weiss and Perkins Coie, along with the consequential deals struck by some firms, exemplify the daunting circumstances that lawyers encounter in today’s world. In this context, Jedidiah Kroncke’s new article on legal complicity is particularly compelling. Written a year before Donald J. Trump’s return to power, Kroncke could not have anticipated the subsequent aggressive actions against U.S. law firms. His primary focus is the ethical dilemmas faced by American lawyers practicing abroad, especially in authoritarian regimes like Russia and China.” Read the rest of Liu’s review here and download Kroncke’s article here.
Recommended Reading
“Legal Ethics and the Rule of Law” by the Brennan Center for Justice. Here’s an excerpt:
All practicing lawyers, including government lawyers, are bound by a variety of rules and standards enforced by state and federal courts, bar authorities, and the broader profession. The erosion of both formal checks and informal constraints on abuse of power in the executive branch has cast a spotlight on the question of what conduct these rules and standards do and do not proscribe. To help answer this question, we have consulted with dozens of legal ethics experts and practitioners, and our conclusions reflect their input.
Broadly speaking, the most relevant constraints found in constitutional and statutory law, court rules, codes of professional conduct, and long-standing policy guidance from DOJ and other agencies can be distilled into at least six broad principles:
Dishonesty is prohibited. Criminal and civil law and rules of professional responsibility and court procedure strictly prohibit dishonesty to courts, clients, other participants in legal proceedings, and in some cases even the general public. Dishonesty can include both affirmative misrepresentations and omissions of relevant facts. Abuses of power, including politicized or partisan prosecutions, will often necessitate some form of dishonesty, which would be the basis for an actual rule violation.
Defiance of court orders is prohibited. Overtly disobeying or encouraging a client to disobey a court order violates multiple disciplinary rules and could subject an attorney to legal sanctions or a finding of criminal contempt.
Criminal investigations, prosecutions, and lawsuits must have some good-faith, credible basis in law and fact. Bringing criminal proceedings without probable cause or pursuing frivolous civil actions that lack a cognizable basis in either fact or law violates numerous rules. Particularly in civil cases, however, the bar for formal sanctions is high. The fact that a civil claim, particularly one brought by a private party, is novel in some respect generally does not establish a sanctionable violation.
Law enforcement cannot be used to harass, intimidate, or exact political retribution or as leverage to achieve unrelated political goals. Pursuing even nonfrivolous investigations or prosecutions primarily to harass or intimidate targets or as a form of political leverage violates numerous agency policies and other long-accepted ethical standards for government lawyers. It also potentially violates specific disciplinary rules in certain jurisdictions.
Conflicts of interest and similar misuses of office are generally prohibited. All lawyers must adhere to attorney conflict rules. These rules include restrictions on concurrent representation of a client who is directly adverse to another client, “switching sides” between two clients in a particular matter or a set of related matters, and representing a client whose interests are materially adverse to a former client in the same or a substantially related matter (proscribing government lawyers from participating in official matters that they previously worked on outside of government). These rules can generally be waived if both the former and current clients explicitly agree (for waiver purposes, a government attorney’s “client” is usually the agency that employs the attorney). Government lawyers are also subject to various ethical rules for federal employees, including gift restrictions, criminal prohibition on participating in a specific matter in which they have a financial interest, and other constraints. Most of these restrictions cannot be waived.
Lawyers are responsible for their own conduct and that of supervisees. Every practicing lawyer is required to obey rules of professional conduct and other ethical standards. Line prosecutors and other subordinate government lawyers generally cannot evade responsibility for ethical violations on the grounds that they were following a supervisor’s directives. Moreover, supervisors can be held responsible for directing unethical conduct by the lawyers whose work they oversee.
Read more here.
“Do The Wrong Thing – How Attorney Facilitation of Anti- Environment, Social, and Governance Policies May Violate Attorney Ethics” by Victor Flatt (Case Western). From the abstract:
Soon after the ascension of Environment, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) factors in private sector shareholder, financing, and consumer decisions, a torrid Republican political backlash against ESG has taken hold and is being accelerated in the second Trump Administration. American proponents of the consideration of ESG in corporate decisions argue that it is financially material and blocking its consideration amounts to possible breaches of fiduciary duty. But what of the role of attorneys? Very few political or private financial decisions are made or enforced without the work of attorneys. This article reviews the current flux in attorney ethics scholarship and the increasing use of attorney ethical complaints to ask whether a politically motivated anti-ESG action that could financially harm consumers or the public raise attorney ethical considerations. If so, what are they and how can these issues be reconciled?
“Justice Work as Democracy Work: Reimagining Access to Justice as Democratization” by Matthew Burnett (Arizona State, American Bar Foundation) and Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State, American Bar Foundation). From the abstract:
In democracy, justice is supposed to be everyone’s: everyday people are meant to participate meaningfully in shaping law’s content, using its protections, and fulfilling the obligations it creates. Research demonstrates very clearly, however, that justice is not available to everyone. Global estimates suggest that over 5 billion people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population, live outside the protection of the law. Critical to justice being everyone’s is everyone having access to it. Yet all too often access to justice is constrained by regulatory capture, administrative burden, and institutional failures that estrange people from their own law. The estrangement of people from their own law is not just a problem of social welfare policy or justice service delivery, it is a failure of democracy. In this paper, we explore the role of access to justice in building and enlivening democracy through a critical mechanism to demonopolize and democratize the law: justice workers. Justice workers are community members who enable their neighbors to access justice by helping them to understand, use, and shape the laws that order their lives. They may do this as part of their formal roles such as religious leaders, teachers, social workers, librarians, or healthcare providers, or simply as fellow members of a community. We argue that justice work makes democracy work.
Legal Ethics Trivia
From the Texas Center for Legal Ethics, here’s the question of the month: “Can an attorney agree to be bound by a non-disparagement clause in a client settlement agreement?” Test yourself at this website where you can read a short hypothetical, select an answer, and see your results. So far, only 49% have gotten it right. Will you?
Get Hired
Did you miss the 300+ job postings from previous weeks? Find them all here.
Assistant/Associate Professor of Law, Washington & Lee University School of Law — Lexington, VA. From the posting: ”The Washington and Lee University School of Law warmly invites applications for up to two tenure-track or tenured faculty positions that will begin on July 1, 2026. A J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school or equivalent is required. We particularly encourage applications from entry-level and junior lateral candidates (either pre-tenure or recently tenured) to join our faculty at the Assistant or Associate Professor level, but we encourage applications from candidates at all levels of experience. Candidates should have a distinguished record of scholarly achievement or demonstrated potential for high scholarly achievement, effective teaching, active service, and a record of inclusion. Our search will focus on applicants whose research and teaching interests include tax law, professional responsibility/legal ethics, and/or constitutional law.” Learn more and apply here.
Compliance Counsel, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — Washington DC. From the posting: “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) seeks a passionate and creative Compliance Counsel to join our team to temporarily assist CREW’s General Counsel in all legal matters pertaining to the organization and the legal department. This six-month position is a unique opportunity to be on the front lines of the fight for a more ethical, equitable and accountable government, while working alongside smart, creative and kind people.” Salary range $120,000-$150,000 annually. Learn more and apply here.
Conflicts Counsel, Husch Blackwell — Multiple Locations. From the posting: Conflicts Counsel directs and conducts specific processes in the Conflicts department, including efficient review, identification and resolution of conflicts of interest, drafting conflicts waivers, review of lateral candidates, outside counsel guidelines, and provides recommendations regarding ethical wall implementation and conflicts-related language for engagement letters. Further responsibilities will include timely and clear communication with partners, staff, and firm leadership regarding conflicts requests and complex conflicts questions; maintaining thorough and accurate records of conflicts resolutions; and assistance with identifying, resolving, and documenting erroneous, outdated, or incomplete conflicts information in existing records in order to maintain the integrity of information.” Salary range $123,000 – $239,000. Learn more and apply here.
Conflicts Counsel, Kirkland & Ellis – Multiple Locations. From the posting: “You’ll research complex legal relationships, offer strategic guidance, and help refine the Firm’s conflicts processes—all while supporting high-stakes decisions that impact daily operations. This role demands strong judgment, clear communication, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-responsibility environment.” Salary range $158,000 – $180,000. Learn more and apply here.
Deputy Ethics Counsel, New Jersey Courts — Ewing, NJ. From the posting: “The New Jersey Judiciary is seeking well-rounded attorneys proficient in handling a caseload of investigations, capable of litigating disciplinary hearings and able to prepare well-drafted pleadings and legal briefs. The Office of Attorney Ethics seeks candidates with highly developed organizational, decision making, interpersonal, and conflict management skills who are adept with legal research and word processing technology. The Deputy Ethics Counsel will direct assigned investigators in the conduct of disciplinary investigations.” Salary range $96,767.80 to $140,941.95 annually. Learn more and apply here.
Legal AI Governance and Integration Lead, American Arbitration Association — NYC/Hybrid. From the posting: “The Legal AI Governance & Integration Lead will be a key architect in shaping the AAA’s legal frameworks and compliance strategies for AI-infused products. This leadership role integrates legal expertise with AI fluency to ensure trustworthy, ethical, and strategically aligned deployment of machine intelligence. As a linchpin between legal, technical, and executive teams, the Lead steers governance protocols, AI knowledge ecosystems, and model validation pipelines—empowering AI innovation while ensuring defensibility, fairness, and regulatory readiness.” Salary range $163,000 to $175,000 annually plus 20% incentive target. Learn more and apply here.
Legal Counsel, Ethics, Campaign Legal Center — Washington DC. From the posting: “Reporting to the Ethics Director, the Legal Counsel works on both proactive and responsive actions consistent with mission of CLC’s ethics program, including conducting legal and factual research, ethics investigations, drafting complaints, rulemaking petitions, letters, testimony and other public documents, as well as working with outside groups to advance our mission. The Legal Counsel will advise on the application of various ethics laws and rules, including the Ethics in Government Act, 18 U.S.C. §208, the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, congressional ethics rules, and the Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court. The Legal Counsel’s duties will include bringing legal actions before the Office of Government Ethics, the Office of Special Counsel, the U.S. Senate Committee on Ethics, the U.S. House Committee on Ethics, the Office of Congressional Conduct, the Judicial Conference, the Department of Justice, and state and local ethics commissions.” Salary range $107,759.00 to $145,793.00 annually. Learn more and apply here.
Upcoming Ethics Events & Other Announcements
Did you miss an announcement from previous weeks? Find them all here.
Keep in Touch
- News tips? Announcements? Events? A job to post? Reading recommendations? Email legalethics@substack.com – but be sure to subscribe first, otherwise the email won’t be delivered.
Renee Knake Jefferson holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and is a Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Check out more of her writing at the Legal Ethics Roundup. Find her on X (formerly Twitter) at @reneeknake or Bluesky at legalethics.bsky.social.
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