City Bar Launches Podcast Series with Legal Ethics Experts Stephen Gillers and Barbara S. Gillers

The New York City Bar Association has launched a podcast series called “Legal Ethics in the News,” featuring legal ethics experts Stephen Gillers and Barbara S. Gillers.

The podcasts’ topics “will be drawn from court opinions, ethics opinions, proposed New York rule changes, and the frequent headline stories about lawyers and judges in the popular and legal media,” the Gillers said. “Legal ethics issues, broadly defined, are often in the news because lawyers are.”

It is expected that each episode will address one or two issues, with one of the Gillers interviewing the other on a rotating basis. For some episodes, a guest will be invited to participate, with both Gillers conducting the interview and joining the discussion.

The first episode is online and covers two topics: the rules governing the practice of law from a jurisdiction in which a lawyer is not admitted, and the question of whether New York should have an ethics rule forbidding discrimination and harassment in law practice.

Listeners will be invited to send questions or comments that the Gillers might address in future episodes.

Stephen Gillers has been a professor of law at New York University School of Law since 1978 and was Vice Dean from 1999-2004. Professor Gillers has written widely on legal and judicial ethics in law reviews and in the legal and popular press, and is quoted widely in the media on breaking legal stories. He is the author of Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics, a widely used law-school casebook first published by Little, Brown (now Wolters Kluwer/Aspen) in 1985 with a 12th edition in November 2020. For many years, four or five times each year, he has been lecturing on legal ethics in New York City Bar Association Continuing Legal Education courses.

Barbara S. Gillers has been an adjunct professor of Law at New York University School of Law since 2009 focusing in the area of professional responsibility, legal ethics and the law governing lawyers. She designed and led a clinic offering legal ethics advice to pro bono and non-profit lawyers. She has been of counsel at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP where she advised law firms, not-for-profit and corporate law departments and others on compliance and regulatory matters, and has served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York where she brought pattern and practice civil rights cases. She served as Chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as Co-Chair of the New York State Committee on Standards of Attorney Conduct. She served as a Vice President of the New York City Bar Association, Chair of its Executive Committee and Chair of its Professional Ethics Committee and has lectured on legal ethics in New York City Bar Association Continuing Legal Education courses.