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Professor Margaret Tarkington was working as a lawyer in Indianapolis when the matter In Re: Michael A. Wilkins was decided.

The short story: Wilkins, an Indiana attorney, criticized a judge, and faced a 30-day suspension from the practice of law as discipline. Wilkins asked for a rehearing, and a divided Indiana Supreme Court voted to issue a public reprimand instead. This case would prove to be the beginning of Professor Tarkington's research into her new book, Voice of Justice: Reclaiming the First Amendment Rights of Lawyers, the first to address the subject.

Fun fact: Professor Frank Sullivan, Jr., was a Justice on the Indiana Supreme Court during the Wilkins case. He dissented, believing Wilkins' speech was protected by the First Amendment, and therefore no sanction of any kind should apply.

Professor Tarkington later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. While working there, another attorney was sanctioned over a speech issue.

"I began wondering, do I just live in jurisdictions that do this kind of thing?" Professor Tarkington said.

That led her to begin researching instances where attorneys were punished for their speech. What she found was that incidents of lawyers being disciplined because of the things they said was not merely taking place in Indiana and Utah. It was happening everywhere.

Professor Tarkington turned to academia, teaching at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and at the University of Cincinnati College of Law before joining the faculty at IU McKinney. She began writing about attorney First Amendment rights, including The Truth Be Damned: First Amendment, Attorney Speech, and Judicial Reputation, which was published in Georgetown Law Journal, and A First Amendment Theory for Protecting Attorney Speech  in UC Davis Law Review, among others.

After creating a semester of reading handouts for a constitutional law seminar on the First Amendment rights of lawyers, and receiving a query from a colleague at another law school as to whether she knew of a comprehensive resource regarding lawyer First Amendment rights, Professor Tarkington decided to begin writing her own.

"My whole thesis for the book is that the First Amendment protects the role of the lawyer in the justice system," she said. "Lawyers must have free speech rights, petition rights, and association rights. Yet what I found was that these rights were being left to the good graces of the regulators. Lawyers are the voice of justice, and justice can only be achieved through their voices."

Professor Tarkington's book was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2018. She will present a Faculty Book Talk about the work at IU McKinney on November 29 at 4 p.m. The event will carry 1.0 hour of CLE (includes Ethics).

Professor Tarkington serves as the Association for American Law School's Professional Responsibility Section Chair, and has served as an expert consultant on disciplinary proceedings brought against attorneys for their speech, association, and petitioning. She teaches courses in Professional Responsibility, Civil Procedure, and Federal Courts at IU McKinney.