I
was just thinking that I haven’t written a judge-bashing blog post in quite a while.
And then, out of the blue, I got a call from criminal defense lawyer and
free speech advocate Terry W. Rose, telling me about an outrageous opinion piece
in the November issue of Wisconsin ’s
state bar magazine. This piece, subtitled
“never provide information in blog posts . . . that criticizes judges,” is especially
alarming because it was written by a lawyer and, worse yet, the vice chair of
our state bar professional ethics committee.
Essentially, the opinion piece makes two claims.
Its first claim pertains to lawyers discussing cases in which they are,
or have been, involved as counsel. (I’ve
already written about that tandem of bizarre ethics rules in an earlier blog post
and in a forthcoming law review article.)
And its second claim — the claim I want to address in this post — is
that ethics rules 20:8.2 and 20:8.4(c) “make it very clear that a lawyer may
not criticize a judge in most circumstances and doing so could result in
significant sanctions.”
