Lynn A. Baker (University of Texas School of Law) has posted The Politics of Legal Ethics: Case Study of a Rule Change (Arizona Law Review, Vol. 53, 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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This Article was prepared for the Ted Schneyer Ethics Symposium: Lawyer Regulation for the 21st Century held at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in January 2011. Despite its obvious importance to the content and legitimacy of a state’s rules of legal ethics, the process by which these rules are made has received little scholarly attention. This Article undertakes a case study of the 2005 amendments to the Texas ethics rule governing referral fees and fee sharing among attorneys as a window through which to explore some larger questions about state supreme courts’ regulation of the legal profession: what are (and should be) the goals and purposes of the process by which states’ rules of legal ethics are made; and how might that rulemaking process be (re)structured in order best to achieve those goals and purposes?