This article examines a long-forgotten controversy about lawyers' duties to evaluate the justice of their clients' causes in civil cases that took place among the members of the Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) that drafted the 1908 Canons of Professional Responsibility. The article presents an analysis of newly discovered internal working documents of this important, but never before examined, ABA committee, supplemented with primary historical research into the views and backgrounds of the committee's members. The article demonstrates how a clash of perspectives among these men—traceable in part to their backgrounds but also to their unpredictable allegiances to conflicting trends in legal thought at the turn of the century—prevented the committee from reaching a satisfactory resolution on the duty's to-do-justice issue. The committee members instead adopted ineffectual compromise language in the Canons, leaving us with a legacy of concealed ambivalence on the question of lawyers' “duty to do justice” in civil cases.

This paper concerns the relationship between power and the ability to defend the night of privacy. The discourse of public and private spheres has shifted historically, engendering arbitrary and changing legal and cultural definitions of the boundary between public and private. Historic specifications of this boundary have become untenable as increasing numbers of women entered the paid labor force. Recent formulations define the boundary of privacy as an area within each individual's life. However, greater social power increases the ability to protect personal privacy because it offers the ability to define and protect the “private” from scrutiny.

After outlining the history of the shifting public/private boundary, this argument is applied to sexual harassment. Explicitly sexual types of harassment are related to the public/private boundary in two ways. First, they challenge the boundary itself, representing the occurrence of “private” conduct in the “public” sphere of work and education. Second, sexual harassment reveals the importance of social power in defining and defending one's privacy. Sexual harassment represents the extreme on a continuum of communication patterns between status unequals, and an invasion of the sexual privacy of the target.

This paper examines the extent to which Pennsylvania county courts are prepared to implement the judicial bypass provision of the state's abortion statute. Under the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act it is illegal for physicians to perform abortions on pregnant minors without parental consent. The constitutionality of this requirement has been upheld, but only when states provide a mechanism allowing a minor to bypass parental involvement. The Pennsylvania statute includes a judicial bypass provision that is formally consistent with legal precedent. However, based on a study of how county courts respond to inquiries into the judicial bypass procedure, this paper demonstrates that most courthouses are not prepared to implement or provide accurate information on bypass proceedings. Since the constitutionality of parental involvement requirements is conditioned on the availability of a bypass option, the paper argues that the courts' lack of readiness poses a significant threat to the rights of pregnant minors.