In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession.

• Author: Simon, William H.
• Position: Book Review

By Deborah L. Rhode. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xi + 272 pp. $27.50. ([dagger])

Introduction

This collection of seven comments inspired by Deborah Rhode's recent book, In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession, has two surprises. First, we encounter the delightful phenomenon of the 15-page, sparsely footnoted law review article. While not exactly an innovation, the form is all too rare, and we find here sparkling illustrations of its virtues.

Second, while the contributors are all friends and collaborators of Deborah, the range of opinion is strikingly broad. For the past twenty-five years, Deborah has been demonstrating, with analytical acuity and an unrivalled grasp of fact, that the American legal profession consistently fails to live up to its professed commitments to client service and the public interest. In the Interest of Justice is surely the most fully developed expression of this argument anyone has produced to date. However, if anyone thought that the book was the last word on the subject, these essays will prove them severely mistaken.

Some of the essays are written in the spirit of Deborah's views and elaborate her argument in particular contexts. However, others turn out to be skeptical, sometimes extremely skeptical, about her premises and her project.

In the category of sympathetic elaboration we have Robert Gordon, Dennis Curtis and Judith Resnik, and Anthony Alfieri. Gordon describes the deep historical roots of both the profession's ideals of public commitment and the practices with which these ideals are routinely betrayed. He extends his and Rhode's critique of the profession to the Enron scandal.

In the spirit of Rhode's longstanding insistence that we focus on the institutional constraints on ethical conduct, Curtis and Resnik focus on the topic of hourly billing. They demonstrate how the prevailing form of fees in corporate practice generates pressure against honest dealing and high quality service, and in accordance with the Rhodean precept that critique must be followed by proposals for reform, they make some original suggestions for fixing the problems.

Anthony Alfieri, the entrepreneurial instigator of this collection (Alfieri is the Diaghilev of the legal academy), speculates on how Rhode's effort to formulate an effort that synthesizes client loyalty and public interests would apply in one of the most ethically and emotionally charged...