An indispensable tool for students taking courses in professional responsibility, this book contains only the essential resources: the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the official comments; a selection of the most distinctive state variations; and more than 130 original practice questions, in the format used in the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE), along with answers and detailed analyses.

Professors and students will benefit from:

• The ABA Rules of Professional Conduct and the official comments, as issued through August 2022.
• A carefully selected compilation of variations found in state ethics codes. Each variation was chosen to demonstrate a policy choice made by a state that departed from the ABA’s suggested model. The purpose is to enable students to compare certain state rules with the Model Rules and to better understand the policy choices reflected in the ABA Model Rules.
• More than 130 original practice questions, organized into 14 chapters, in the multiple-choice format used by the MPRE, which permits students to test their understanding of each topic studied in the course.
• Detailed narrative analyses of the answer to each question, explaining why one choice is correct, and why each incorrect answer is not correct.

In The End of Asylum, three experts in immigration law offer a comprehensive examination of the rise and demise of the US asylum system, showing how the Trump administration has put forth regulations, policies, and practices all designed to end opportunities for asylum seekers and what we can do about it.

Graham Allison's book Essence of Decision changed the way in which academic analysts think about how governments make major foreign and defense policy decisions.1 Before Allison's book appeared in 1971, even the leading writers on foreign policy tended to describe and explain governmental decisions almost exclusively as if governments were rational human beings making carefully considered choices among available options. This book applies the Allisonian framework to the response of the United States government to a private arms control initiative undertaken in 1986 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization.

Although Americans generally think that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is focused only on preventing terrorism, one office within that agency has a humanitarian mission. Its Asylum Office adjudicates applications from people fleeing persecution in their homelands. Lives in the Balance is a careful empirical analysis of how Homeland Security decided these asylum cases over a recent fourteen-year period.

Day in and day out, asylum officers make decisions with life-or-death consequences: determining which applicants are telling the truth and are at risk of persecution in their home countries, and which are ineligible for refugee status in America. In Lives in the Balance, the authors analyze a database of 383,000 cases provided to them by the government in order to better understand the effect on grant rates of a host of factors unrelated to the merits of asylum claims, including the one-year filing deadline, whether applicants entered the United States with a visa, whether applicants had dependents, whether they were represented, how many asylum cases their adjudicator had previously decided, and whether or not their adjudicator was a lawyer. The authors also examine the degree to which decisions were consistent among the eight regional asylum offices and within each of those offices. The authors’ recommendations­, including repeal of the one-year deadline­, would improve the adjudication process by reducing the impact of non-merits factors on asylum decisions. If adopted by the government, these proposals would improve the accuracy of outcomes for those whose lives hang in the balance.

In 1993, Congress created a student loan repayment plan intended to enable high-debt graduates to accept low-income, public service jobs by reducing their loan payments and eventually forgiving part of their debts. But this Congressional initiative only helps those with catastrophically low incomes. It has failed to attract many users because, as implemented through regulations of the U.S. Department of Education, it requires payment over too long a period (25 years before forgiveness).

Many students go to graduate and professional schools in pursuit of careers in public service. But they often must borrow $100,000 or more to finance their education. Their loan repayment obligations become so high that they can no longer afford to follow their ideals, and they abandon their plans to have public service careers and seek employment with corporations or firms offering high salaries. The income-contingent repayment plan should have appealed to would-be public interest lawyers, who are among the graduates with the highest debt-to-income ratios; but the plan has failed them, and Schrag explores why and how the plan should be reformed, either by Congress or by the federal administration.