In the weeks following the defeat of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, his top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated allegations of widespread electoral fraud and the campaign has spawned a veritable ‘flood’ of lawsuits challenging the results, many of which were dismissed.
Democratic Representative Bill Pascrell last Friday asked Giuliani, and other members of his legal team, to withdraw licenses to exercise, accusing them of opening “frivolous” lawsuits and allegedly trying to help Republican Trump to ‘divert’ November 3 votes to President-elect Joe Biden.
But, according to legal ethics experts, heard by ‘Reuters’, the lawyer’s discipline is relatively rare, especially in politically tense disputes, thus leaving these professionals a huge margin of maneuver. Even considering it “very unlikely” that Trump’s lawyers face a dismissal, suspension or even lighter sanctions, which could involve fines.
In the United States, the 50 states and the District of Columbia have legal ethics rules for lawyers that derive from standards published by the American Bar Association (ABA).
An ABA rule says that lawyers should only file a complaint with the court if “there is a legal and de facto basis for doing so without taking it lightly”. But, individually, there are rules that prohibit lawyers from making false statements to third parties and engaging in misleading conduct.
Judges can punish lawyers who have violated the rules of ethics in a particular case by ordering them to pay the winning party’s fees, and they can also impose milder sanctions, such as removing a dubious document from the court record. These case-specific punishments are known as “sanctions under Rule 11” of the federal court.
Ethics rules are also enforced by regulatory bodies, usually “complaints committees” administered by state justice circles. These bodies can suspend a lawyer or revoke his license.
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