Preface

This casebook presents material for use in a law school Professional Responsibility course. Topics covered include the organization and regulation of the legal profession, the nature of the attorney-client relationship, and the duties that attorneys owe to clients and others.

Most of the materials reproduced here are in the public domain; excerpts from copyrighted materials are included for teaching purposes under the fair use doctrine. Materials have been redacted to omit passages not pertinent to the learning objectives. Judicial opinions have also been “cleaned up”1 for ease of reading.

1 See Jack Metzler, Cleaning Up Quotations, 18 J. App. Prac. & Process 143, 154 (2017) (proposing “cleaned up” parenthetical for quotations from judicial opinions, to indicate the author “has removed extraneous, non-substantive material like brackets, quotation marks, ellipses, footnote reference numbers, and internal citations; may have changed capitalization without using brackets to indicate that change; and affirmatively represents that the alterations were made solely to enhance readability and that the quotation otherwise faithfully reproduces the quoted text.”)

Online Casebook Features

Use the navigation menu in the left-hand sidebar to select chapters (upper menu) and navigate through sections within chapters (lower menu).2

2 On small screens and mobile devices, the sidebar may be hidden and you can access the menu using the button at the top of the page.

Upper Navigation Menu

Lower Navigation Menu

You can also navigate forwards and backwards using the arrows at the bottom of each page.

Numbered sidenotes3 are used in place of footnotes (with original source material note numbers indicated in parentheses).

3 This is an example of a sidenote.

Unnumbered margin notes (green sans-serif typeface) are used for editor’s comments within cases and other source material.

This is an example of a margin note.

Links to external material are indicated by blue text, e.g. Mayo v. Satan.

Click on the icons at the top of the sidebar for these resources:

4 Issue reporting requires a GitHub account. It’s free and a useful resource.