Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

My latest academic article published - Revisiting the Original Congressional Debates About the Second Amendment - #2A Thanks to the editors at Missouri Law Review for editing/publishing it. Read/download here: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol88/iss2/9/

Ethical Issues with Lawyers Openly Carrying Firearms    St. Mary’s Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics (Forthcoming) December 18, 2019 Abstract Ethical concerns arise when lawyers openly carry firearms to adversarial meetings related to representation, such as depositions and settlement negotiations. Visible firearms introduce an element of intimidation, or at least the potential for misunderstandings and escalation of conflicts. The adverse effects of openly carried firearms can impact opposing parties, opposing counsel, the lawyer’s potential clients, witnesses, and even judges and jurors encountered outside the courtroom. The ABA’s Model Rules of Professional in their current form include provisions that could be applicable, such as rules against coercion and intimidation, but there is no explicit reference to firearms. Several reported incidents with lawyers and firearms have occurred in recent years, and as states liberalize their “open carry” laws, as well ...

Gun Violence as an Obstacle to Educational Equality   University of Memphis Law Review, Forthcoming Abstract:  This paper addresses the issue of school gun violence as both a result and a cause of ongoing educational inequality. First, gun violence and homicides have reached epidemic levels in recent years among minority teenagers in the United States, and the constant disruption, trauma, and fear that go along with such day to day violence significantly affect the educational and psychological development of urban youth, and thus their eventual educational and career achievements. Second, media attention and recent legislative initiatives to permit or require guns in schools (arming teachers, etc.) focus on the comparatively rare phenomenon of active shooter scenarios (school massacres or shooting rampages), which are predominantly a suburban phenomenon, while ignoring the causes and effects of routine, lower-fatality gun incidents in poorer urban schools. Measures ...

Dec. 18, 2019 - forthcoming in Penn State Law Review Smart Guns, the Law, and the Second Amendment   https://ssrn.com/abstract=3500570   Abstract:  Smart guns, which originally meant personalized guns that only the owner could fire, had a false start as a promising new technology several years ago. Nevertheless, policymakers have shown renewed interest in the wake of highly publicized incidents of gun violence, as well as advances in technology. The first generation of smart guns foundered on problems with the reliability of the technology, as well as a legislative misstep that would have banned all other guns as soon as smart guns appeared in the retail market, triggering massive boycotts of certain manufacturers and dealers, and a subsequent abandonment of the project by the gun industry overall. Newer technologies, however, such as improved biometric grip identifiers, precision-guided rifles that rarely miss, blockchain or “glockchain” automated tracking, ...

Codes of legal ethics vary state by state, but most draw heavily from the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct.  The ABA has revised Rule 1.6 (duty of confidentiality) in recent years, adding or clarifying exceptions, and states have been adopting these revisions very gradually, leading to many splits between states about when a lawyer can, or must, divulge confidential client information.  I have a new  article on SSRN  criticizing the confidentiality rules from a variety of angles:  Against Confidentiality .   Feedback is welcome!  Here is the abstract: Confidentiality rules form an important part of the ethical codes for lawyers, as a modern, expansive extension of the traditional attorney-client privilege doctrine.  The legal academy, judiciary, and practitioners generally agree on the conventional wisdom that strict confidentiality rules are necessary to foster client-lawyer communication, thereby providing lawyers with i...

My STCL colleague  Derek Fincham  has a new article on SSRN entitled  The Parthenon Sculptures and Cultural Justice , which I recommend to my readers - it's a very interesting subject.  Here is the abstract: From government and philosophy to art drama and culture, the ancient Athenians, as most everyone knows, gave future generations so much. Yet the pinnacle of their artistic achievement, the Parthenon, remains a damaged and incomplete work of art. 2012 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the last removal of works of art from the Parthenon. That taking was ordered by an English diplomat known to history as Lord Elgin, and it reminds us that cultures create lasting monuments. But not equally.  Cultures which remove the artistic achievements of other nations have increasingly been confronted with uncomfortable questions about how these objects were acquired. Nations of origin are increasingly deciding to press claims for repatriation of works taken long ...

My writing project this summer is now taking shape as a draft manuscript, and is available for download on SSRN.  I would really appreciate current or former students, colleagues, and friends downloading it and giving me feedback on it, as I plan to spend the Fall revising it and then submit it to journals in February.  The title/link is Codification and Transaction Costs , and here is the tentative abstract: The consensus view in the academic literature has been that rules present lower transaction costs – in the form of information costs – for the courts and citizenry, when compared to standards. Rules are more specific and detailed, so there is less uncertainty and less need for sophisticated interpretation. At the same time, the prevailing wisdom holds, specific rules impose higher enactment costs for legislatures. Systematic codification, which became of universal feature of American statutes in the twentieth century, seems to invert this relationship, lowering transa...

A new essay in the California Law Review  by the Dean there (Christopher Edley, Jr.)discusses the history of American law schools - in terms of their mission - and predicts the direction things are heading.  VERY refreshing after reading so many posts on law professor blogs about how we need to revert  to being more like a trade school (teaching skills rather than theory).  I really liked the abstract: This Essay describes the changing role of American law schools throughout the twentieth century and proposes a vision for the future’s Great American Law School. Since the founding of Berkeley Law, the definition of the legal profession has progressed from an interior orientation, which focused predominately on trial courts and appellate advocacy, to an exterior orientation with wide consideration of other forms of lawyering. Along a second axis, legal pedagogy has progressed from a careerist orientation, which focused on case analysis and advocacy skills, ...

My latest article - forthcoming in Boston College Law Review - Standing as Channeling in the Administrative Age by Drury Stevenson, Sonny Eckhart :: SSRN We're looking for input and feedback, so download it and send us comments!

I have a new article coming out this summer in the North Carolina Law Review  entitled Judicial Deference To State Legislatures in Constitutional Analysis . It started as a paper about Bustamonte- type consent searches and North Carolina's unique statute defining consent in these cases - but it turned into an article about the relationship between the judiciary and legislatures in Fourth and Fifth Amendment cases.  Here is the abstract:  North Carolina is one of the only states to have a statutory definition of voluntary consent for police searches; it essentially codified the Supreme Court’s “ Bustamonte ” rule. In theory, this statute could eventually face a constitutional challenge if the Supreme Court adopted a requirement of informed consent – police warnings of the right to refuse a search – as many have urged. Considering this possibility as a hypothetical, it seems strange that conventional Fourth Amendment analysis has largely ignored whether challenged state ...