Wendel's Cancelling Lawyers is a rigorous and thought-provoking book that explores a deceptively simple but most interesting question in legal ethics: Can we hold lawyers morally accountable for their choice of clients?That is, do they owe-and if so, to whom-an explanation when they represent "repugnant" clients?Can lawyers be blamed or criticized-and, if so, by whom-for representing unpopular, harmful, or morally troubling figures, such as sexual predators, terrorists, white supremacists, war criminals, etc?These questions have significant implications for legal practice.The book offers a thoughtful and nuanced inquiry, illustrated by real and genuinely engaging case studies that illuminate multiple aspects of the issue.Cancelling Lawyers is intellectually rich, and I am grateful to Wendel for an exceptionally insightful and rewarding read.This review offers a set of initial thoughts on the moral accountability of lawyers vis- a-vis Wendel's central thesis.Before proceeding, three preliminary notes are in order.First, although questions of lawyer accountability may arise in both litigation and non-litigation settings, this review focuses on litigation to maintain scope, clarity, and analytical focus.Second, while the book addresses the moral accountability of lawyers in relation to both their choice of clients and the manner in which they conduct litigation, my focus is confined to the former.To keep the analysis "clean," I shall be assuming that once representation has been undertaken, the lawyer's conduct is lawful and ethical-marked by sincere efforts to advance the client's legal rights fairly and decently, without resorting to extreme forms of zealous advocacy or inappropriate practices of partisan representation (such as concealing evidence or engaging in degrading cross-examinations).I acknowledge that these assumptions may not always reflect reality, but I adopt them here to avoid ancillary complications and focus squarely on the central question that animates Wendel's

“Personalized Law”is a remarkable book in its scope and creativity, inviting readers to imagine a radically different world of customized legal rules while challenging our assumption that current legal rules are depersonalized. Whether taken as a practical guide for developing more effective and equitable legal rules or as a thought experiment questioning our current notions of legal commands, it provides insights into the relationship between legal design and the policies underlying those laws.\nIn this Response, I address one type of first-stage prediction imperfection — the instability of intrapersonal predictions across model iterations — and discuss its implications for personalized law. While some prediction error is a necessary property of classification and prediction methods, I argue that this error, as it pertains to an individual’s prediction, may not be stable over iterations of the prediction model. As I will demonstrate in a particular setting below, small changes to the training set used to predict a borrower credit risk can produce different risk scores despite the stability of the overall model accuracy measure. If the prediction and classification functions we use to produce individual scores are unstable, this means that legal rules at the second stage, when tailored to reflect and individual’s score or classification, will also be unstable. Decisions made by model designers can produce varying legal rules for individuals even at the initial stage of model development; however, my focus is on the instability of predictions over time.

Journal Article Relational Wrongs vs. Wrongs Period: Personal Accountability vs. Accountability to the Moral Community Get access Stephen Darwall Stephen Darwall Yale University, USA; Email: stephen.darwall@yale.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, Volume 27, Issue 1, June 2023, Pages 15–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrls/jlad003 Published: 06 June 2023

The Principles of Constitutionalism identifies and expounds the principles that should, and to an extent must, structure the constitutions of states.1 I hoped that the book would stimulate discussion and debate over the issues it engaged, and I am grateful for the contributions to this volume and for the generous introduction written by Malcolm Feeley. Not only are the articles deep and challenging engagements with the book, they are, also, important contributions to constitutional theory more generally. In this reply I cannot hope to engage with all of the issues raised by the authors, but will focus on three strands drawn from their work: the nature and location of sovereignty; the constitutional role of political parties; and, finally, the potential of constitutionalism to fight democratic decay and the rise of authoritarianism. The passion with which debates over sovereignty are conducted is matched only by...