Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
Happy Monday!
Over the past eighteen months, I’ve been immersed in multiple collaborative endeavors with more than a dozen different coauthors. Some are updates to older casebooks and treatises, but two projects are new casebooks, one which hit the shelves last week. Rocky Rhodes (Missouri) and I are thrilled to release into the world our casebook Constitutional Law: Foundations, Interpretations, and Commentaries (West Academic). We are especially grateful to our publisher Louis Higgins, who suggested we work together.
Stay tuned for more publication reveals from my coauthors and me in the coming weeks and months!
For now, let’s turn to the headlines.
Highlights from Last Week – Top Ten Headlines
#1 “DOJ Lawyers’ Courtroom Lies Challenge Judiciary, Ex-Judges Say.” From Bloomberg Law: “Former federal judges are lamenting a new challenge their colleagues on the bench face: government lawyers making false statements in court. Federal prosecutors and lawyers ‘are lying to the federal courts,’ and President Donald Trump and top officials are ‘trashing individual judges,’ retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, a George H. W. Bushappointee to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, said at a Wednesday event in Washington. In some cases, ‘you are wondering whether or not the information being given by the component of the action is accurate, and you’re asking for details to follow up, and getting gibberish,’ said former Judge Paul Grimm, director of Duke Law School’s Bolch Judicial Institute. The judges made their remarks at a panel hosted by the Society for the Rule of Law, a conservative legal group that’s been critical of Trump’s policies. A study published this month by nonpartisan legal journal Just Security found over 40 cases where federal courts have found ‘serious defects’ in the government’s representations in court, including false statements and contradictions.” Read more here.
#2 “What if the Big Law Firms Hadn’t Caved to Trump?.” From The New Yorker: “It is worth considering how we got here, and whether we could have done anything to slow this downward spiral. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but it doesn’t require a giant speculative leap to conclude that, had major U.S. law firms not so quickly surrendered to Trump, this spring, he would have been denied early momentum for his lawlessness. Perhaps a united opposition might have even provided the opposite momentum, toward a defense of the rule of law.” Read more here.
#3 “Trump’s Multi-Million Request Puts DOJ Integrity to the Test, Legal Scholars Say.” From Axios: “Legal scholars told Axios that if the Justice Department hands President Trump the millions in damages he requested in past administrative claims, it would present an egregious breach of ethical safeguards.” Read more here.
#4 “California Supreme Court Rejects Plan to Expunge Attorney Discipline Records.” From Reuters: “The California Supreme Court has rejected a proposal that would have erased records of disciplinary actions against lawyers in the state from public view if they occurred more than eight years ago. The court denied the request by the State Bar of California on Wednesday, which means the older records will continue to appear on lawyers’ public bar profiles. The court also rejected the bar’s proposal to lower fines for disbarred lawyers from $5,000 to $1,000 and to eliminate a $2,500 fine on suspended attorneys.” Read more here (gift link).
#5 “State AGs Attacking ESG Are Flirting With Ethics Violations.” From Victor Flatt (Case Western) in Bloomberg Law: “The rise of environmental, social, and governance factors in private sector shareholder, financing, and consumer decisions has spurred a conservative backlash that’s accelerating in the second Trump administration. This response has mutated from being bad policy of questionable legality to possibly violating legal ethics, including by some state attorneys general. Such ethical concerns simply can’t be ignored or glossed over and ultimately may provide a check on government efforts to stamp out ESG completely.” Read more here.
#6 “The Department of Justice’s Broken Accountability System.” From the Brennan Center for Justice: “Attorneys in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) must comply with the professional and ethical standards set forth in department regulations and policies, state bar rules, and federal law. Since January 20, however, the second Trump administration has systematically dismantled the DOJ’s internal controls that help ensure compliance with these standards. This paper explains what those internal accountability systems were, how the administration has broken them, and how courts are grappling with the consequences as they confront a DOJ presenting questionable legal positions and assertions of fact, evading court orders, and overstepping its prosecutorial authority.” Read more here.
#7 “More AI-Using Litigants Getting Caught Hallucinating.” From Bloomberg Law: “Litigants’ usage of AI-hallucinated cases, quotes, and citations in briefs and other case filings is becoming increasingly common, based on a Bloomberg Law analysis of court opinions and other judicial orders. In 2025, instances in which lawyers and pro se litigants were caught misusing generative AI have increased sevenfold. As tech-savvy litigants swiftly adopt artificial intelligence tools, they take on the risk associated with relying on a generative AI chatbot to conduct legal research, often failing to verify hallucinated case law before building their legal briefs. The results of the data analysis bolster the perception that AI misuse is expanding.” Read more here.
#8 “Legal Ethics Amid Technological Change: From AI to Virtual Lawyering.” From ABA’s Business Law Today: “Artificial intelligence and digital tools are rapidly reshaping the legal landscape, but they do not eliminate the need for lawyers to comply with longstanding professional rules. The CLE program The Great Tech Quest of 2025: Ethical Considerations in AI, Deepfakes, Social Media, Cybersecurity, and Virtual Lawyering at the ABA Business Law Section (“BLS”) 2025 Fall Meeting delivered a timely and thought-provoking exploration into the ethical, practical, and technological challenges facing today’s legal professionals. The discussion, moderated by Jasmine Smith, Chair of the BLS Professional Responsibility Committee and Partner at Robinson Gray Stepp Laffitte, featured helpful insights from Amy Richardson, Partner at HWG LLP and Professor at Duke Law School, and Jon Garon, Associate Dean for Technology and Innovation at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepherd Broad College of Law. Exploring topics from deepfakes to cybersecurity, the panel reviewed the various ethical obligations that apply to lawyers in different technological contexts, including core themes of competence and client confidentiality.” Read more here.
#9 “Appeals Court Weighs Whether Alina Habba Is a Lawful U.S. Attorney.” From the New York Times: “A federal appeals court on Monday considered whether Alina Habba, a former personal attorney to President Trump, is lawfully acting as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, in a case that could help clarify the limits of a president’s power to keep U.S. attorneys in office without Senate involvement. In August, a district court judge ruled that Ms. Habba had been acting as U.S. attorney unlawfully, plunging a struggling New Jersey court system into disarray and placing the work of the federal prosecutor’s office there into a novel form of legal limbo. The judge, Matthew W. Brann, found that Ms. Habba’s interim tenure had expired in early July and that she had not lawfully become the acting U.S. attorney, despite what the Justice Department had said. The department appealed that decision, and in a Philadelphia courthouse on Monday three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit bombarded one of its lawyers with questions while Ms. Habba watched from the gallery.” Read more here (gift link).
#10 “Rural Institutional Loss.” From Elizabeth Chambliss (South Carolina) in Jotwell reviewing Lisa R. Pruitt, Jennifer Sherman, & Jennifer Schwartz, Legal Deserts and Spatial Injustice: A Study of Criminal Legal Systems in Rural Washington, 134 Yale L.J. Forum 847 (2025) and Michele Statz, A World-Threatening Feeling: Grief, Moral Injury, and Institutional Loss in Rural Courts, 93 Fordham L. Rev. 1257 (2025): “Two recent studies of rural court systems highlight the importance of institutional investment for improving access to justice in rural communities. Rural communities not only need more individual providers, such as lawyers and community justice workers, they also need local nonprofits, community action networks, mental health treatment centers and other institutional infrastructure to support and partner with providers including—critically—more public investment in rural county government and courts.” Read more here.
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Renee Knake Jefferson holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and is a Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Check out more of her writing at the Legal Ethics Roundup. Find her on X (formerly Twitter) at @reneeknake or Bluesky at legalethics.bsky.social.
The post Legal Ethics Roundup: Judges Critique Lawyer Lies, CA Won’t Expunge Discipline, AG Attacks On ESG As Ethics Violations, AI Keeps Hallucinating Legal Opinions & More appeared first on Above the Law.