Today’s Rule of Law crisis results in large part from decades of neglect and even Rules violations by the legal profession’s supposed police, its Bar Enforcement Authorities (BEAs). BEAs in D.C., California, New York and virtually every other jurisdiction have literally never enforced the profession’s Honor Code (Rule 8.3) and virtually never enforced its prohibition on statements lacking any good faith basis (Rule 3.1). As one example, how can a profession even claim to have an Honor Code if it is never enforced?

As early as 1993, Yale Law School Dean A. Kronman warned in The Lost Lawyer that, “Every year produces … renewed doubts about the ability of the profession to police itself.”  Those doubts are now certainties.

A decade after Kronman’s warning and in express response to public outcry from the lawyer-complicit, Enron fraud, the ABA and all 50 states exponentially expanded lawyers’ explicit obligations as officers of the court. Disclosure mandates that were previously limited to extraordinarily rare events — a client’s intent to cause future bodily harm — were expanded to include bodily or financial, future or past harm. Yet BEAs have effectively erased the expansions by completely ignoring 8.3 in all but two states and virtually ignoring 3.1 everywhere. In some states, BEAs’ refusals to enforce are concealed from the public and even from their State Supreme Courts (the entities that write the Rules).

DC, CA, and VT as examples. As just examples of the problems but also of possible reforms, this website focuses on DC, Vermont, and California. DC because of its heightened importance to democracy; VT because it has never enforced 8.3 or 3.1, even in response to a Bar Association Survey showing that 3.1 violations are witnessed by over 30% of its lawyers (and over 1,000 times) every year, and its BEAs have gone to extremes in their non-enforcement; and California because, in the wake of its own enforcement scandal, it enacted a uniquely strong 8.3, specifying time limits and expressly calling for reporting to BEAs or courts.