Lawyering for Groups symposium

On Friday, Nov. 30, Fordham Law School will host a symposium entitled Lawyering for Groups: Civil Rights, Mass Torts, and Everything in Between. Organized by Benjamin Zipursky and myself, the conference participants include Elise Boddie, Elizabeth Burch, Kristen Carpenter, Brian Fitzpatrick, Bruce Green, Samuel Issacharoff, Alexandra Lahav, Troy McKenzie, Nancy Moore, Russell Pearce, Theodore Rave and Eli Wald. It is co-sponsored by the Stein Center for Law and Ethics and by the Fordham Law Review, which will publish the papers.

As I read the authors' drafts in preparation for the symposium, I am struck by how difficult the fundamental questions remain. What does it mean, really, for a lawyer to represent a group of similarly situated claimants? Is it a bundle of individual lawyer-client relationships, or is it better understood in practice as a relationship between a lawyer and a group, with the primary duty owed to the group as a whole?  Does class certification fundamentally change the nature of the representation, or in some cases is the class action better understood as an acknowledgement of the reality of mass representation and the imposition of a set of procedural protections? 

I am struck, as well, by how these questions transcend any particular area of practice. The symposium grew out of Ben Zipursky's and my shared interest in the ethics of group lawyering. He and I have lectured to mass tort lawyers on ethics in mass tort litigation, as well as to civil rights lawyers on the ethics of civil rights litigation. Each area brings its own challenges, but the core questions about collective representation apply to both. Convinced that these issues deserve attention, we pulled together a group of proceduralists and ethicists with widely varying views on aggregate litigation and different areas of expertise. I'm looking forward to learning a lot. The agenda is here.

HME