Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law Scholarly Works Faculty Scholarship 2020 Legal Ethics and Law Reform Advocacy Jeffrey W. Stempel University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub Part of the Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons, and the Legal Profession Commons Recommended Citation Stempel, Jeffrey W., "Legal Ethics and Law Reform Advocacy" (2020). Scholarly Works. 1319. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/1319 This Article is brought to you by the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law, an institutional repository administered by the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLE Jeffrey W Stempel Legal Ethics and Law Reform Advocacy Abstract. Social activism, particularly law reform, has long been an accepted, even revered part of the lawyer's identity. However, modern developments such as nation-wide firms, the economic importance of client development, and aggressive attempts by clients to deploy attorneys as de facto, undisclosed lobbyists have put substantial pressure on the traditional vision of the attorney as a "lawyer-statesman" or someone who "checks clients at the door" when participating in law reform activities. Furthermore, law reform activism on behalf of one client (or prospective client when attorneys use their law reform lobbying as part of their marketing strategy) poses a real danger of injury to other law firm clients. The latter may lose cases influenced by Restatements, Model Acts, Committee Reports, or White Papers produced by law reform organizations. Law reform organizations have paid insufficient attention to the problem of the partisan participant, and the legal profession has failed to sufficiently appreciate the positional and institutional conflicts created when lawyers engage in politico-legal activism on behalf of clients.