Rhode Prize Winner 2024: Professor Matthew Liebman

The winner of the 2024 Deborah Rhode IAOLE Legal Ethics Prize is Professor Matthew Liebman of the University of San Francisco School of Law for the paper, “Representing Animals”, which has been accepted to appear in the Maryland Law Review.  The Article evaluates the ethics of legal representation in one of its most challenging contexts: cases involving nonhuman animals, who are increasingly represented in litigation, both formally as plaintiffs and informally as the constituency of social movement lawyering by animal rights advocates. This paper stood out to the judges of the prize as covering completely new ground in the spirit that Professor Deborah Rhode was such a pioneer. Indeed, at the end of her life Deborah had developed a special interest in animals, especially dogs, and was beginning to write in the area leaving an unpublished book manuscript behind. Prof Liebman took a Gender & Law class with Deborah Rhode in law school and has previously been a recipient of a “Deborah Rhode” award for public interest law students at that time.
 

Honorable Mentions:
 

The committee wish to commend Professor Jonah Perlin of Georgetown University Law Center for the paper, “Client Confidentiality as Data Security” to be published in the Washington Law Journal. The paper innovatively considers the way the centuries old lawyers’ duty of confidentiality must evolve with modern technology, specifically cloud computing. Professor Perlin argues that although the duty of confidentiality was once synonymous with a duty to keep client confidences secret, today the duty necessitates that lawyers keep client confidences secure as well.
 

Members of the 2024 Prize Committee were: Christine Parker (Chair), Tim Dare, Renee Knake Jefferson, Kyoko Ishida.