Osler's Razor

One of the people I have had the pleasure of collaborating with over the past year has been Cory Andrews of the Washington Legal Foundation. We have some common interests (for example, last week he testified before the US Sentencing Commission in opposition to many mandatory minimum sentences), and in other areas he has expertise and I do not.

One of those areas is corporate law. Most recently, he wrote an excellent post on the WLF site which was cross-posted at Forbes.com. The piece assails, properly, the Supreme Court's refusal to hear Textron v. United States. In that case, the First Circuit held that the IRS could gain access to important attorney work product produced by in-house counsel, an opinion which has troubling implications for the role of in-house counsel and the ability of those lawyers to properly advise a client (and warn them away from wrongful behavior, for example). If you have any interest at all in corporate law, litigation, or ethics, I hope you will follow the link above to Cory's work.