Eli Wald

• Juris Doctor
• Charles W. Delaney Jr. Professor of Law at University of Denver

This essay examines the demographics of federal district court judges in the 10th Circuit. Consistent with the literature regarding the glass-ceiling effect in positions of power and influence in the legal profession, the study finds that women judges are under-represented on the 10th Circuit bench compared with their numbers as lawyers in the juri...

Lawyers’ commodification of personal identity is nothing new. For generations now, white male lawyers have benefitted from positive racial and gender stereotypes regarding their competence and loyalty to clients and firms to secure job offers, promotions and elevated status within the profession. Yet the concept of identity capital – the value one...

This Article uses the example of BigLaw firms to explore the challenges that many elite organizations face in providing equal opportunity to their workers. Despite good intentions and the investment of significant resources, large law firms have been consistently unable to deliver diverse partnership structures - especially in more senior positions...

As the number of states legalizing medicinal and recreational marijuana increases and marijuana emerges as a growing lawful industry, lawyers find themselves in an awkward position. In most states, lawyers who represent clients in the marijuana industry risk discipline for assisting clients in the commission of a (federal) crime. Even in jurisdicti...

In a new and provocative book, Rob Vischer has challenged the neutral partisan conception of the lawyer and the legal profession’s reductive presumption that all clients wish to pursue atomistic self-interest irrespective of the consequences to others. Vischer’s use of the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Christian theology as a foundati...

Lawyering for groups, broadly defined as the legal representation of a client who is not an individual, is a significant and booming phenomenon. Encompassing the representation of governments, corporations, institutions, peoples, classes, communities, and causes, lawyering for groups is what many, if not most, lawyers do. And yet, the dominant theo...

Today, the criticism of law schools has become an industry. Detractors argue that legal education fails to effectively prepare students for the practice of law, that it is too theoretical and detached from the profession, that it dehumanizes and alienates students, too expensive and inapt in helping students develop a sense of professional identity...

A “standard story” has emerged to explain the growth of the large firm, an account by now so well accepted that it hardly gets challenged or revisited. This standard account, however, fails to adequately describe the actual rich and vibrant world of large law firms. Instead, it only explains a subset of the large law firm universe, the old Wall Str...

While marijuana remains a prohibited substance under federal law – one whose manufacture, possession, or distribution is a serious felony – 17 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized the drug for certain medical uses. This tension between state and federal law creates confusion for all of those who work in the emerging medical marijuana...

In his thought-provoking book, Lawyers and Fidelity to the Law, Bradley Wendel offers an understanding of the lawyer’s role grounded in political philosophy as an alternative to the contrasting perspectives of the neutral partisan and the morally responsible lawyer. Wendel explains that law provides a “coordinating function” that allows “citizens t...

Prevailing myths hold that in-house legal departments offer an attractive work-life balance and equality in their promotion policies, if only in contrast to the hypercompetitive and glass ceiling practice realities at large law firms. This article challenges both myths. While in-house departments do offer greater flexibility, they increasingly impo...

The debate following the shooting of Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords has highlighted the uncivil, angry, and counterproductive state of public discourse today. In this Article, a contribution to a symposium on the Transformation of Public Interest Law, we argue both that lawyers have been responsible for promoting a culture of incivility and have...

The legal profession lags behind other occupations in achieving diversity, and its quest for equality is frustrated by conceptual disagreement and confusion about the meaning of diversity, means of pursuing it, and responsibility for doing so. As a result, while minority under-representation and inequity constitute a serious problem, the profession...

The visibility of socioeconomic status features prominently in a new symposium issue of the Denver University Law Review dedicated to class diversity in American legal education. In the lead article, Richard Sander argues that law schools should replace racial preferences with socioeconomic preferences in their admission processes. Such class-based...

The nationalization of law practice is a significant contemporary development, and globalization of law practice is likely soon to follow. The natural and obvious regulatory solution to nationalization and globalization of law practice is the nationalization, and perhaps down the road the globalization, of the regulatory approach to law practice. Y...

This article explores the interplay between gender identity and racial, cultural, and ethnic identity as well as socioeconomic background, intellectual self esteem, and familial support systems to investigate the experience of women law students in legal education. Consisting of nine narratives by female law students of varying identities and backg...

In an era of increased knowledge about judicial decision-making, performance, and role, a time in which simplistic assumptions about the judiciary are replaced with constructive and detailed informed analyses, myths about judges ought to be discredited. One such simplistic assumption is that judges should regulate lawyers. This Article shows this a...

Perhaps with historical hindsight, 2008–2009 will be remembered not for the Great Recession but as an inflection point for world history, the U.S. economy, and the legal profession. In the short run, however, the impact of the economic meltdown on the legal profession has been quite devastating: unprecedented layoffs, salary decreases, and hiring f...

Increasingly competitive practice conditions in the market for corporate legal services, accentuated by the economic downturn, are transforming not only the practice realities, the organization, and the structure of large law firms, but also their professional ideologies. Glass Ceilings and Dead Ends: Professional Ideologies, Gender Stereotypes, an...

In his new book, Lawyers in the Dock, Richard Abel, a prominent legal profession scholar, has produced a must-read. The book includes six detailed case studies of attorney deviance and explores the attorneys’ backgrounds, career paths, misconduct, and disciplinary records. Through its rich, contextual accounts, the book makes two significant contri...

Loyalty to clients, a cornerstone of the attorney-client relationship, is in limbo. The Bar advocates a client-centered broad interpretation of loyalty, critics call for a narrow approach tempered by duties to non-clients, and consequently disagreement regarding the meaning and scope of loyalty abounds. This Article studies the competing definition...

The current generation of legal profession scholarship has explored the rise and organization of large law firms. A “standard story” has developed regarding the structure of large firms, their hiring and promotion patterns as well as their discriminatory culture, past and present. This Article shows that the “standard story” may offer too narrow an...

This article contributes to the expanding body of literature studying Chinese law and the Chinese legal profession by exploring Chinese legal ethics from the perspective of an American professional responsibility professor teaching in China. Based on the vast differences between Chinese and American law in general, and between Chinese and American...

This Article argues that the communications regime orchestrated by the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct is intentionally designed to create a one-way street, systematically channeling information in the attorney-client relationship in lawyers' direction while often leaving clients in the dark. Furthermore, the asymmetric distribution of info...

The rise and growth of large Jewish law firms in New York City during the second half of the twentieth century is nothing short of an astounding success story. As late as 1950, there was not a single large Jewish law firm in town. By the mid 1960s, six of the largest twenty law firms were Jewish, and by 1980, four of the largest ten law firms were...

During their golden era in the 1950s and 1960s, large American law firms were segregated along religious and cultural lines between WASP and Jewish law firms. The rise and success of large law firms with distinctive religious and cultural identities is surprising because the large firm was purportedly a-religious and meritocratic. This Article asse...

Should a district attorney be disqualified from a criminal case if a prosecution witness is a former client of the district attorney? Although there has been significant academic, legislative and judicial attention to disqualification of district attorneys in general, and to disqualification of district attorneys who represented the defendant in pa...

When a lawyer moves from one firm to another, compliance with two separate ethical obligations can be extremely difficult: keeping information about former clients confidential and avoiding conflicts with interests of those clients. Avoiding conflicts usually requires disclosing confidential information about the former clients in order to discover...

Recent corporate failures have resulted in a rare and important opportunity to revisit our core basic assumptions about, expectations of, and understandings of the roles corporate lawyers play and their duties to their organizational clients, the legal system and the general public, an opportunity the existing scholarship as a whole regrettably fai...

Photocopy. "Submitted to Professor Lucian A. Bebchuk." Thesis (LL.M.)-Harvard Law School, 1998. Includes bibliographical references.