Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
Happy Monday!
And happy early St. Patrick’s Day! 🍀 I’m writing you from Chicago, where I attended a board meeting on Saturday and enjoyed one of the great holiday traditions – a walk along the dyed-green Chicago River.
Highlights from Last Week – Top Ten Headlines 📰
#1 “The Justice Department Wants to Make it Safe for Lawyers to Lie.” Op-Ed from Deborah Perlstein (Princeton) in The New York Times: “For presidents, broadly speaking, lying is not against the law. For lawyers pursuing a president’s agenda, however, it’s a very different story. Like all other lawyers licensed to practice in the United States, if they violate legal ethics rules, they can face sanctions in court or professional discipline, up to and including the permanent loss of their license to practice. Efforts to overturn the 2020 election foundered in court more than 60 times, before judges of both parties, in part because lawyers arguing President Trump’s case often feared telling a court the same extravagant lies that the president was telling the American people. That was then. Now, under pressure to ignore a range of ethics rules, a large number of Department of Justice attorneys have quit, opting to lose their jobs but save their careers. Between these departures and a purge of legal staff members seen as insufficiently loyal to the president’s agenda, the department has lost thousands of lawyers. It shows: Briefs are riddled with errors. Attorneys come to court grossly unprepared. Worst, court orders stand violated — in some cases, it seems, because there weren’t enough lawyers available to ensure they were carried out.” Read more here (gift link). (For more on lawyer lies and the first amendment, see my Yale Law Journal Forum article.)
#2 “LDF Denounces Proposed Rule Shielding DOJ Lawyers From Accountability and Ethics Enforcement.” From the Legal Defense Fund: “Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published a proposed rule in the Federal Register that would allow the Attorney General to intervene in state bar disciplinary investigations and demand that those investigations be suspended while the DOJ conducts its own internal review. The proposal threatens to undermine independent oversight by state ethics committees, fails to protect the public from unethical acts, and risks shielding DOJ attorneys from meaningful accountability. ” Read more here.
#3 “ISBA Files Comment Opposing Proposed Department of Justice (DOJ) Rule Seeking to Interfere With State Disciplinary Investigations Involving DOJ Attorneys.” From the Illinois State Bar Association: “On Thursday, March 12, 2026, the Illinois State Bar Association formally filled its comment in opposition to the Department of Justice’s (‘DOJ’) Proposed Rule concerning ‘Review of State Bar Complaints and Allegations Against Department of Justice Attorneys.’ The Proposed Rule, which was filed by the DOJ last week, relates to state disciplinary agencies’ investigations and prosecutions of DOJ attorneys. It would establish a process for the DOJ to review bar complaints and allegations against its attorneys. Under the Proposed Rule, before a current or former DOJ attorney could participate in any disciplinary investigation by a state disciplinary authority, the DOJ would have the right to review the misconduct allegations in the first instance and request the state disciplinary authority to suspend its investigation until the completion of the DOJ’s review.” Read more here.
#4 “The Legal Ethics Issue That Will Never Die.” From Brad Wendel’s Legal Ethics Stuff: “There has been a lot of reporting and commentary recently about a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) from the Department of Justice, the main thrust of which is to interpose the DOJ into the process of disciplining DOJ lawyers for violations of the rules of professional conduct. Unlike some of the more bumptious actions of Pam Bondi’s DOJ, this NPRM actually looks reasonable well thought out and put together by, you know, actual lawyers in the DOJ. For one thing, it’s actually published in the Federal Register as a formal rulemaking. It’s also, in some ways, less aggressive than it might have been if it had simply been dashed off by Boris Epshteyn, like the law firm executive orders. Bottom line up front (BLUF): I think this is mostly for show and won’t change much. However, there has been a lot of discussion about it that exposes some confusion about the issues at stake. This is nothing new. … When I first came into this area as a lawyer and then as a graduate student in the mid to late 1990s, the conflict between the DOJ and state rules of professional conduct was already old news, having been aired out during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, but going back even farther to an OLC opinion in 1980, during the Carter administration, which concluded that ‘[s]tate bar associations may not, consistent with the Supremacy Clause, impose sanctions on a government attorney who has acted pursuant to his federal law enforcement responsibilities.’ One theme of this history is that Attorneys General of both parties uniformly resent what they take to be the meddling of state disciplinary authorities in the functioning of the DOJ and the conduct of its lawyers.” Read more here.
#5 “Ed Martin Faces Disciplinary Proceedings Over Actions as D.C. U.S. Attorney.” From The Washington Post: “The senior Justice Department official faces disciplinary proceedings over a letter he sent to Georgetown University’s law school about its DEI practices.” Read more here (gift link).
#6 “Trump Lawyer Rebuked at ABA for Saying DOJ in a ‘Better Place’.” From Bloomberg Law: “A typically collegial white collar legal conference turned testy when one of the president’s defense attorneys faced incredulous and at one point rancorous pushback for praising Trump’s Justice Department. John Lauro, who represented President Donald Trump in special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 election interference case, offered a starkly opposing view to his co-panelists Friday at an American Bar Association-hosted discussion in San Diego on threats to the rule of law. Veteran department officials and a former judge described a constitutional crisis playing out under Attorney General Pam Bondi. But Lauro said DOJ is ‘in a better place’ than a year earlier ‘because I have the unique experience of representing a political figure who was probably more abused by the criminal justice system in America than any other political figure ever.’ … Retired US District Court Judge Nancy Gertner, who now teaches at Harvard Law School, later retorted: ‘Whatever the issues were with respect to the Trump prosecution, they do not justify the fracture of American democracy.’” Read more here.
#7 “Arizona Supreme Court Makes Modest Changes to Law License Program.” From AZ Central: “The Arizona Supreme Court took another step to change the state’s experiment with law licensing, but set aside advice from the State Bar that the reforms may not do enough to keep ordinary legal clients safe.” Read more here.
#8 “US Judges Condemn Trump Appointee’s ‘Vulgar Barroom Talk’ in Transgender Bias Case.” From Reuters: “Nearly 30 U.S. appeals court judges have issued unusual written rebukes to a colleague over his coarsely worded dissent in a case involving a spa for women that refused service to a transgender woman. The judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were writing late Thursday in response to Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke’s dissent from the full court’s decision not to review the spa’s claims that a Washington state anti-discrimination law violated its constitutional rights.” Read more here.
#9 “Who Holds Congress Accountable? A Look at the Invisible Ethics System for Lawmakers.” From PBS: “Congress is charged with writing the laws that govern the rest of us, but who holds lawmakers accountable when they break the rules? We take a closer look at the number of sitting members of Congress facing active ethics investigations, and the largely invisible system designed to police them.” Read more and listen here.
#10 “98-Year-Old Federal Judge Suspended for Mental Fitness Appeals to Supreme Court.” From The Hill: “Pauline Newman, a 98-year-old federal appeals judge suspended by her colleagues over concerns about her mental fitness, has asked the Supreme Court to step into her fight to resume hearing cases, her lawyers said Thursday. Three years ago, Newman’s fellow judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit prevented her from taking on new cases indefinitely. Newman has sued them, arguing it’s unconstitutional.” Read more here.
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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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