Ethical Lawyering While Our House is on Fire Article
Date of Publication:
Recommended Citation
Jaclyn Lopez, Ethical Lawyering While Our House is on Fire, 40 Md. J. Int'l L. 1 (2025)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
This Essay scratches the surface of whether important tenets of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (MRPC) meet the needs of movement lawyers and their clients. It begins by describing what movement lawyering is and its role in advancing social movements. It explores the evolution of the MRPC's justice aspirations, including the more recent cultural competence and anti-bias instructions. While centering the major rules of the MRPC such as duty of loyalty, confidentiality, and communication, the Essay tackles issues such as how do the MRPC accommodate movement lawyers' duties of loyalties to both their clients and their movement, where do the MRPC limit how movement lawyers can push the law, whether the MRPC truly permit movement lawyers to aid their clients in civil disobedience and other law-breaking activity, the limitations on movement lawyers
as press contacts, and how the MRPC guide movement lawyers in advancing their causes in sympathetic jurisdictions.