ACLPA Annual Legal Ethics Symposium Scott Cummings (UCLA/ACLPA)

The ACLPA Annual Legal Ethics Symposium will take place june 18 2026 at the Roeterseiland Campus, in room A3.15 from 15:00 til 17:30.

The symposium will be held in a hybrid format. Please indicate if you would like to attend the symposium via Zoom. The link will be sent to you one day before the symposium.

More information will follow soon.

Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice, and local government law.

A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and Democracy, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy.

In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.

Professor Scott Cummings guests as a distinguished visiting professor of Legal Ethics at the Amsterdam Centre on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice from April 2025 to the end of the academic year 2025-2026.

Read more about his work and research here.

The program for the day is as follows:

3.00 pm Welcome + brief introduction Iris van Domselaar (Chair Legal Philosophy and Legal Ethics) and Tamara Butter (Assistant Professor Sociology of Law and Legal Ethics)

3.10 pm Keynote: Scott Cummings (UCLA) - Democracy in Legal Jeopardy: What Attacks on the American Bar Teach about Professional Resistance

3.40 pm Response 1: Susan Bartie (Australian National University)

3.50 pm Response 2: Ronald Tinnevelt (Radboud University)

4.00 pm Break

4.15 pm Response 3: Jan Lelieveld (Van Doorne / Lawyers for Lawyers)

4.25 pm Reply by Scott Cummings

4.35 pm Q&A

4.55 pm Concluding remarks

5.00 pm Drinks

Abstract

Scott Cummings will discuss the troubling trend of lawyers as architects of autocracy. His talk will examine how some lawyers, sworn to uphold the rule of law, forge alliances with illiberal movements seeking to dismantle its core features. Drawing on evidence from the first year of the second Trump administration, he will explore specific legal strategies used to capture government lawyers and neutralize the private bar, while considering the degree to which the organized profession and ordinary citizens can protect democracy in perilous times--with lessons for Europe and beyond.

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Host or Publisher Amsterdam Center on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice