Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
ISSN
0024-7081
Publisher
Springer
Language
en-US
Abstract
In 2003, I published an article entitled “Who Should Regulate Class Action Lawyers?”1 In that article, I defended the decision of the American Bar Association’s (“ABA”) Commission on Evaluation of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (the “Ethics 2000 Commission”), for which I was Chief Reporter, not to propose any substantial amendments to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct (“Model Rules”) concerning the ethical conduct of class action lawyers.
There are many ethical issues that confront class action lawyers. In my 2003 article, I focused on conflicts of interest—an issue that courts and commentators have had difficulty resolving and a subject on which I have frequently written. My defense of the Ethics 2000 Commission’s decision began with an attempt to narrow the scope of the problem. First, I argued that the class should be viewed as a type of entity client, rather than an aggregation of individual clients or quasiclients with actual or potentially conflicting interest.5 If the client is the class itself, then the class lawyer can ignore intra-class conflicts that might otherwise pose an ethical problem under conflict of interest rules, such as Model Rule 1.7.6 Of course, intra-class conflicts do raise important questions concerning the adequacy of representation under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,7 but they do not, and should not, come within the purview of Model Rule 1.7.
Recommended Citation
Nancy J. Moore,
Who Will Regulate Class Action Lawyers?
,
44
Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal
577
(2013).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/2624
Please note the file available on SSRN may not be the final published version of this work.
