The Model Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers, upon which nearly all fifty state supreme courts base their legal ethics codes, direct lawyers to pursue the public good in their role as "public citizen[s] with special responsibility for justice." Yet, the lawyer as a public citizen is undertheorized in the literature and is not the focus of legal education. And even if this role is deemed important, questions remain of what, exactly, is the lawyer's responsibility as a "public citizen" and what skills a lawyer should possess to fulfill this role.

This essay first describes how the Model Rules of Professional Conduct — the lawyer's ethical rules — rhetorically construct the public citizen role but offer little on how the lawyer should implement this role in her professional life. It then offers how others have attempted to put flesh on the bones of the "public citizen" role so as to have as complete a view as possible of what that role means for lawyers. It explains the generally well-accepted view that law schools have largely failed to teach skills and instill values related to lawyers' roles as public citizens. And, finally, it argues that teaching rhetorical criticism skills in law school can play a central part in giving lawyers the intellectual skills to perform their roles as fiduciaries of the rule of law and participatory democracy and to understand themselves as moral actors in the public sphere.

This article suggests that the first-year legal writing class is important because it is the primary place where students engage in praxis by exercising judgment about both the means for accomplishing a legal task and the desired ends and enacting their knowledge, skills, and values.

Is there any reason for lawyers to write legal memoranda, particularly when some lawyers report that they no longer value the “traditional” legal memo? Does the legal memorandum – a common first writing project for law students – have any application whatsoever beyond the first year of law school? Does the usefulness of the memo decrease when it is read on a mobile device?

This article takes issue with the idea that the “traditional” legal memorandum is dead. It challenges lawyers, law faculty, and law students to think more deeply about the purposes of the legal memo, its role in modern legal practice, and its readability in a mobile computing world. And it offers a view of the legal memo that draws upon not only legal practice traditions but also upon the rules of ethics, rhetorical theory, cognitive science, and on-screen readability studies.

Florida has adopted an informal intervention process to deal with complaints of lawyers’ lack of professionalism when the acts do not rise to the level of an ethics violation. This article describes that process and reflects upon its potential shortcomings.

The increased production of legal forms by commercial publishers, the electronic availability of lawyer-produced documents through subscription-based and free Internet sites, and the increasing number of institutionally approved forms is creating a paradoxical and challenging environment for principled form use by lawyers. On the one hand, courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies, for example, encourage, and even require, the use of forms in the practice of law. Commercial publishers tout the benefits of form use to sell legal formbooks and to entice lawyers to access subscription databases filled with contracts, pleadings, briefs, and motions. On the other hand, the same entities that encourage form use in some circumstances sternly admonish lawyers for using or relying on forms in others.

As the time constraints on lawyers become greater, legal practice becomes more global and multi-jurisdictional, and information increases exponentially and becomes more difficult to manage, lawyers, particularly lawyers new to practice or new to a particular practice area need to develop a principled approach to legal form use to ensure forms are used competently. This article explores legal forms and proposes a rhetorical approach to understanding and using forms. This approach is unique because it uses rhetorical theory to define and categorize legal forms, and it offers specific suggestions for competent legal form use based on rhetorical theory.