Race Ethics: Colorblind Formalism and Color-Coded Pragmatism in Lawyer Regulation

• Author: Anthony V. Alfieri
• Position: Dean's Distinguished Scholar, Professor of Law, and Director, Center for Ethics and Public Service, University of Miami School of Law
• Pages: 353-410

ARTICLES

Race Ethics: Colorblind Formalism and

Color-Coded Pragmatism in Lawyer Regulation

ANTHONY V. ALFIERI*

ABSTRACT

The recent, high-profile civil and criminal trials held in the aftermath of the

George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders, the Kyle Rittenhouse killings, and

the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally violence renew debate over race,

representation, and ethics in the U.S. civil and criminal justice systems. For

civil rights lawyers, prosecutors, and criminal defense attorneys, neither the

progress of post-war civil rights movements and criminal justice reform cam-

paigns nor the advance of Critical Race Theory and social movement scholar-

ship have resolved the debate over the use of race in pretrial, trial, and

appellate advocacy, and in the lawyering process more generally. Spoken in ar-

chetypal tropes, seen in stereotypical images, and heard in stock stories, race

infects the central lawyering roles of advocate and advisor, echoing inside and

outside courthouses and resounding in the rules of professional responsibility

and the norms of professionalism. By turns cast in colorblind, color-coded, and

color-conscious oral, written, and symbolic forms, the meaning of racial iden-

tity, racialized narrative, and racially demarcated community is both con-

structed and contested in the lawyering process and in the regulation of lawyer

conduct.

In prior writings across the fields of civil rights, criminal justice, and

poverty law, I mapped the intersection of race, representation, and ethics

against the contours of the lawyering process, professional regulation, and

* Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, Professor of Law, and Director, Center for Ethics and Public Service,

University of Miami School of Law. © 2023, Anthony V. Alfieri. For their comments and support, I am grateful

to Atinuke Adediran, Deborah Archer, Alina Ball, Paul Butler, Sergio Campos, John Cannon, Susan Carle,

Charlton Copeland, Scott Cummings, Andrew Elmore, Sheila Foster, Ellen Grant, Adrian Barker Grant-Alfieri,

Amelia Hope Grant-Alfieri, Bruce Green, Irene Joe, Donna Lee, Samuel Levine, Peter Margulies, Rick

Marsico, Veronica Martinez, JoNel Newman, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Russell Pearce, Alex Rundlet, Janet

Sabel, Jane Spinak, Scott Sundby, Paul Tremblay, and the participants in the Stephen Ellmann Clinical Theory

Workshop. I also wish to thank Theo de Sa-Kaye, Gabrielle Thomas, Sean Werkheiser, and Robin Schard for

their research assistance, and the editors of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, especially Brooke Brimo,

Chibunkem Ezenekwe, Justin Moyer, and Nathan Winshall, for their commitment and patience.

353

legal education, especially within law school clinics and indigent civil and

criminal justice systems. The purpose of this article is to revisit that body

of writing and to reevaluate the continuing uses and the persisting stigma

harms of race in contemporary civil rights and criminal justice advocacy,

particularly in cases of racial violence. The goal of revisiting and enlarg-

ing this previous work is to grasp more fully how civil rights lawyers, pros-

ecutors, and criminal defense attorneys use race to advantage or

disadvantage Black litigants, victims, jurors, witnesses, and even other

lawyers—and, moreover, how they use ethics rules and standards designed

to regulate racial bias and prejudice to justify their conduct.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355

I. THE STANDARD CONCEPTION OF RACE IN THE LAWYERING

PROCESS .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

II. RACE-NEUTRAL FORMALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

A. RACE-NEUTRAL FORMALISM IN PRACTICE . . . . . . . . . . . 369

B. RACE-NEUTRAL RULE FORMALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380

1. COMPETENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380

2. DILIGENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383

3. COMMUNICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384

III. RACE-CODED PRAGMATISM . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

A. RACE-CODED PRAGMATISM IN PRACTICE . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

B. RACE-CODED RULE PRAGMATISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402

1. SCOPE OF REPRESENTATION AND ALLOCATION OF AUTHORITY 402

2. ADVISOR . . . . .

.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406

CONCLUSION . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409

354 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LEGAL ETHICS [Vol. 36:353

INTRODUCTION

The recent, high-profile civil and criminal trials held in the aftermath of

the George Floyd

1

and Ahmaud Arbery murders,

2

See generally Richard Fausset, What We Know About the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery, N.Y.

TIMES (Feb. 7, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georgia.html [https://

perma.cc/9VR9-UDBV]; Christian Powell Sundquist, White Vigilantism and the Racism of Race-

Neutrality, 99 DENV. L. REV. 763, 765–71 (2022); Ahmaud Arbery: A Curated Collection of Links,

MARSHALL PROJECT, https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/8993-ahmaud-arbery [https://perma.

cc/2VPP-DAGC] (last visited Feb. 22, 2023).

the Kyle Rittenhouse kill-

ings,

3

See Liane Jackson, Race to the Bottom: Guns, Vigilantism and Unequal “Justice,” 108 ABA J. 11

(2022); Cynthia Lee, Firearms and Initial Aggressors, 101 N.C. L. REV. 1, 13, 36–40 (2022); Paige Williams,

Kyle Rittenhouse, American Vigilante, NEW YORKER (June 28, 2021), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/

2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante [https://perma.cc/4EYM-QCWN].

and the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally

4

See Neil MacFarquhar, Jury Finds Rally Organizers Responsible for Charlottesville Violence, N.Y.

TIMES (Nov. 23, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/us/charlottesville-rally-verdict.html [https://

perma.cc/DK9U-CECZ]; Neil MacFarquhar, The Charlottesville Rally Civil Trial, Explained, N.Y. TIMES

(Nov. 23, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/charlottesville-rally-trial-explained [https://perma.cc/

B7CY-HCVJ]; Sines v. Kessler, No. 3:17CV00072, 2021 WL 8533299 (W.D. Va. Nov. 23, 2021) (federal jury

verdict awarding plaintiffs $26,004,743 in compensatory and punitive damages).

violence renew

debate over race, representation, and ethics in the U.S. civil and criminal

justice systems.

5

See Anthony V. Alfieri, Race, Legal Representation, and Lawyer Ethics, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

RACE AND LAW IN THE UNITED STATES (Devon Carbado, Emily Houh & Khiara Bridges eds., 2022), https://

doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947385.013.22 [https://perma.cc/22BW-UTMR].

For civil rights lawyers, prosecutors, and criminal defense

attorneys, neither the progress of post-war civil rights movements

6

and

criminal justice reform campaigns

7

nor the advance of Critical Race

Theory

8

and social movement scholarship

9

have resolved the debate over

1. See ROBERT SAMUELS & TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, HIS NAME IS GEORGE FLOYD: ONE MAN’S LIFE AND THE

STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE 308–54 (2022).

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. See generally SCOTT L. CUMMINGS, AN EQUAL PLACE : LAWYERS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LOS ANGELES

(2021); KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR, FROM #BLACKLIVESMATTER TO BLACK LIBERATION (2016); Veryl

Pow, Grassroots Movement Lawyering: Insights from the George Floyd Rebellion, 69 UCLA L. REV. 80

(2022).

7. See generally Amna A. Akbar, An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform, 108 CALIF. L. REV. 1781

(2020); Monica C. Bell, Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement, 126 YALE L.J. 2054

(2017); Thomas Ward Frampton, The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics, 135

HARV. L. REV. 2013 (2022).

8. See generally Montre

´ D. Carodine, Contemporary Issues in Critical Race Theory: The Implications of

Race as Character Evidence in Recent High-Profile Cases, 75 U. PITT. L. REV. 679 (2014); Anne D. Gordon,

Cleaning Up Our Own Houses: Creating Anti-Racist Clinical Programs, 29 CLINICAL L. REV. 49 (2022);

Norrinda Brown Hayat, Freedom Pedagogy: Toward Teaching Antiracist Clinics, 28 CLINICAL L. REV. 149

(2021).

9. Compare Scott L. Cummings, Law and Social Movements: Reimagining the Progressive Canon, 2018

WIS. L. REV. 441, 441 (discussing the construction and critique of the progressive legal canon—“iconic legal

campaigns to advance progressive causes”—in the study of lawyers and social movements), with Amna A.

Akbar, Sameer M. Ashar & Jocelyn Simonson, Movement Law, 73 STAN. L. REV. 821, 821 (2021) (defining

movement law as “an approach to legal scholarship grounded in solidarity, accountability, and engagement

with grassroots organizing and left social movements”), and Betty Hung, Movement Lawyering as Rebellious

Lawyering: Advocating with Humility, Love and Courage, 23 CLINICAL L. REV. 663, 664 (2017) (denoting

2023] RACE ETHICS 355