Rory Little Serves on ABA Task Force Revising Criminal Justice Standards

UC Hastings Professor Rory Little has been diligently working for the past eight years as a Reporter to the ABA’s Task Force on Criminal Justice Standards for the Prosecution and Defense Functions.

The draft Standards are now at the highest level of the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section. Little will present them to the Council on May 11-12, and once the Council approves them, they will go to the floor of the ABA’s House of Delegates for final adoption (expected in 2014). The Standards have not been revised since 1993, and about one-third of the proposed revisions are actually entirely new substantive content.

Two years ago, the draft Standards were the subject of 12 law school Symposia around the country. Resulting from these Symposia were 19 scholarly articles, published in two UC Hastings law journal Symposium issues, 62 Hastings Law Journal (May 2011) and 38 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly (Summer 2011).  Little published an article in each issue, “The ABA’s Project to Revise the Criminal Justice Standards for the Prosecution and Defense Functions,” 62 HLJ 1111 (2011) and “The Role of Reporter for a Law Project,” 38 HCLQ 747 (2011).

The Criminal Justice Standards have been cited by the Supreme Court dozens of times (usually for the “standard of care” for defense and prosecution lawyering conduct). They have been cited thousands of times by lower courts, every federal Circuit, and virtually every State.

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