Ethics

I've just about finalized my list and am drafting it now, but this year I thought I'd also run a Condorcet poll to see what our readers think the top stories were.  Here's some of the topics I've been considering.  Please don't vote or rank these yet, because the Condorcet poll will be for that purpose.  But if you see anything missing, please let me know so that I can include all the best topics in the final poll.

• Web 2.0 (lawyers using social media sites to get clients, etc.)
• SCOTUS, Congress, the First Amendment, and Lawyers (SCOTUS is increasingly asked to decide when a Congressional statute infringes freedom of speech in the context of lawyering)
• The OPR Report regarding the authors of the "torture memos"
• The legal issues arising out of the BP oil spill (supposed judicial conflict, debate about the proper role of plaintiff's lawyers, and President Obama's complaint that BP was "lawyering up")
• Disputes over the adequacy of Public Defender funding
• 50th Anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird
• The ABA's 20/20 Commission provoke debate over the role of technology and geography in the regulation of lawyers.
• Padilla v. Kentucky (SCOTUS case holding that criminal defense counsel's failure to address immigration implications of a guilty plea was ineffective assistance of counsel)
• Florida and New York restrictions on advertising run into First Amendment problems.
• Foreclosure fraud involving lawyers.
• USA Today runs comprehensive series on errors and omissions by federal prosecutions.
• Litigation funding takes off.
• Legislatures attack law school clinics and the clinics strike back.
• The economy continues to force adjustments in private practice, while law schools wonder if a bubble is about to burst.
• FTC raises the white flag about its Red Flag regulations.
• Akzo Nobel denies attorney client privilege to in-house counsel in Europe.
• The concept of a uniform bar exam keeps creeping forward.
• Perdue v. Kenny A (In a "reverse Lake Wobegon" ruling, SCOTUS rules that lodestar is appropriate recovery except in truly rare and exceptional cases -- rules, in essence, that not nearly as many cases are exceptional as the trial courts have believed.)
• Charles Hood received a new trial -- but not on the grounds that the prosecutor and judge were romantically involved.