I
was just thinking that I haven’t written a judge-bashing blog post in quite a while.
And then, out of the blue, I got a call from criminal defense lawyer and
free speech advocate Terry W. Rose, telling me about an outrageous opinion piece
in the November issue of Wisconsin ’s
state bar magazine. This piece, subtitled
“never provide information in blog posts . . . that criticizes judges,” is especially
alarming because it was written by a lawyer and, worse yet, the vice chair of
our state bar professional ethics committee.
Essentially, the piece makes two claims.
Its first claim pertains to lawyers discussing cases in which they are,
or have been, involved as counsel. (I’ve
already written about that tandem of bizarre ethics rules in an earlier blog post
and in a forthcoming law review article.)
And its second claim — the claim I want to address in this post — is
that ethics rules 20:8.2 and 20:8.4(c) “make it very clear that a lawyer may
not criticize a judge in most circumstances and doing so could result in
significant sanctions.”
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Sunday, December 7, 2014
How Wisconsin saved the Big Ten (and more college football madness)
By losing 59-0 to Ohio
State , the Badgers made the
Buckeyes look so good that “the committee” leapfrogged them over TCU and into
college football’s field of four “playoff” teams. Meanwhile, both TCU and Baylor — the
so-called “co-champs” of the Big 12 — got left out of college football’s
“little dance.” In some sense this is unjust,
given that the Big 12 is a stronger conference than both the Big 10 and the
ACC. But in addition to blaming Wisconsin ,
the two Texas teams from the Big
12 can also blame their own conference.
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