June 18, 2024
1:00pm – 2:00pm Eastern
[Police Misconduct]: Navigating the Conflicts of Interest facing the Municipal Attorney Responsible for Police Misconduct Litigation
Description: In cases involving alleged police misconduct, civil suits seeking damages are usually brought against individual officers under Title 42, United States Code, section 1983, though sometimes units of local government employing the officers are also named as defendants. The unit of government that employs the officer is usually obligated to provide a defense for the officer-defendant, and to indemnify the officer for legal costs, including the payment of judgments and settlements of actions arising from the scope of employment. Individual officers named as defendants accordingly are represented by attorneys whose fiduciary obligations run to the officer, not the municipality or other governmental entity that employs the officer. These attorneys have an ethical obligation to keep evidence of their clients’ misconduct from their clients' employers, even if this leads to expensive settlements paid by the employer. Thus, there is a serious potential conflict of interest between the interests of the individual officer named as a defendant that the officer's employer, raising important issues of both ethics and public policy. This presentation will outline those conflicts and suggest how they may be best navigated by municipal attorneys, even when they must hire or supervise attorneys representing individual officers entitled to indemnity, while also protecting the interests of their governmental client.
Speaker: Lawrence Rosenthal
Lawrence Rosenthal After graduating from Harvard Law School, where he won the Fay Diploma and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Professor Rosenthal clerked for Judge Prentice Marshall of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court. Professor Rosenthal entered the practice of law as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, specializing in organized crime and public corruption prosecutions. Among other things, he brought the first racketeering case involving insider trading, and secured the longest sentence in the history of the district in an organized crime case (200 years). He subsequently joined the City of Chicago's Department of Law, where he was Deputy Corporation Counsel for Counseling, Appeals, and Legal Policy. In that capacity, he argued three cases in the United States Supreme Court, and supervised a large volume of complex litigation as well as legislative as policy matters.
To his great embarrassment, Professor Rosenthal was named by Chicago Magazine as one of "Chicago's 25 Toughest Lawyers". Since then, he tries to be nicer. Professor Rosenthal joined the Chapman faculty in the fall of 2005. He also continues to engage in litigation in the United States Supreme Court and other appellate courts, usually on a pro bono basis