Readers may recall that we had a series of posts late last year (here, here, and here) about Professor Bill Simon's provocative and controversial article on legal ethics experts, The Market for Bad Legal Advice: Academic Professional Responsibility Consulting as an Example. More recently, there was this story about it in Fortune Magazine.
Now Professor Bruce Green, one of the targets of Professor Simon's article, has posted his response on SSRN. The response will soon appear in the same issue of the Stanford Law Review as Professor's Simon's work, and it will contain a similarly provocative title. It's called, "The Market for Bad Legal Scholarship: William H. Simon's Experiment in Professional Regulation."
I'm a somewhat biased observer of the debate at this point, since I expressed skepticism about Professor Simon's article when he first posted it (some of which now appears in Professor Green's article). With that disclaimer, I found Professor Green's response to be powerful and quite convincing.
Wow.
Posted by: Alan Childress | July 20, 2008 at 08:25 PM
The case of dishonestly among ethics experts is, of course, ironic. But how about Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Lucas who within months of winning was described by a judge as having "disdain for reality" in his expert testimony. Swapping money for institutional authority is hardly limited to lawyers. For more see Jeffrey L. Harrison. Reconceptualizing the Expert Witness," 19 Yale J. on Reg. 253 (2001)
Posted by: Jeff Harrison | August 01, 2008 at 01:09 PM