id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
inlawrev-22383	Hanlon, Stephen F.	Case Refusal: A Duty for a Public Defender and a Remedy for All of a Public Defender's Clients	2018	29	.pdf	application/pdf	13777	768	56	While no formal study has been conducted with respect to public defender caseloads generally, the author’s experience in representing and advising public defenders for over twenty years confirms this fact. The law creates a duty between persons based on the nature of their relationship, their reasonable expectations of one another as a result of that relationship, and the circumstances of the case.215 When a statute provides, in substance, that a public defender “shall represent” all eligible individuals, there is a reasonable expectation, I submit, on the part of the public defender’s client community, as well as all three branches of government, that public defender representation will be forthcoming, which should suffice to trigger an obligation of the public defender to “protect [their future] client’s interests” in obtaining competent counsel when they seek to decline future appointments.216 But even if there is no such duty under law, there is no good reason for a public defender seeking to decline future appointments not to “take steps to the extent reasonably practicable to protect a [future] client’s interests.”	cache/inlawrev-22383.pdf	txt/inlawrev-22383.txt