This unique collection of ten significant ethics rulings reveal the rich background surrounding salient cases on issues of race, gender, class, taxation, bankruptcy, defense representation, confidentiality, practicing with law partners, and greed. The story behind each case provides a look into its immediate impact as well as its continuing importance in shaping the law. This book serves as a reminder that ultimately law is about human beings, not ?doctrines? or even ?cases,? because the human lives it addresses are real and vivid. The stories typify issues that most lawyers confront in one form or other at some time in their careers. In a striking way, the stories bring a human dimension to the pressures lawyers face, the ethical decisions they confront, the institutions they work in, and the daily choices they make.
A 70-year-old woman bed-bound following a stroke has developed bronchopneumonia, but her daughter produces an advance directive that she says her mother has written, which states that no life-sustaining treatment is to be given. How are you going to proceed? A practical guide on how to approach the legal and ethical dilemmas that frequently occur in hospital wards and medicine in the community, 100 Cases in Clinical Ethics and Law explores typical dilemmas through the use of 100 common medical scenarios. The book covers issues such as consent, capacity, withdrawal of treatment and confidentiality, as well as less-frequently examined problems like student involvement in internal examinations, whistle-blowing and the role of medical indemnity providers in complaints. Each scenario has a practical problem-solving element to it and encourages readers to explore their own beliefs and values, including those that arise as a result of differing cultural and religious backgrounds. Answer pages highlight key points in each case and provide advice on how to deal with the emotive issues that occur when practising medicine, at the same time providing information and guidance on appropriate behaviour.
Jonathan Herring provides a clear and engaging overview of legal ethics, highlighting the ethical issues surrounding professional conduct and raising interesting questions about how lawyers act and what their role entails. Key topics, such as confidentiality and fees, are covered with references throughout to the professional codes of conduct.
What options did Paul Bernardo’s lawyer have when his client directed him to retrieve hidden evidence? Where would David Milgaard be today if a lawyer hadn’t doggedly challenged his murder conviction? And what should a defence lawyer do when told her client is a danger to the public? In this equally inspiring and troubling book, leading Canadian legal academics and practising lawyers draw on real-life stories – case studies, biography, and memoir – to examine the tension between ethics and the law. Whether re-examining high-profile cases, celebrating barristers who tore down barriers, or pointing out current injustices within the justice system, their stories are compelling and raise important questions about what it means to be a “good” lawyer.
William Simon, a legal theorist with experience in practice, here argues that the profession's standard approach to questions of legal ethics is incoherent and implausible, insisting the critical weakness is the style of judgment.
This concise book brings behavioral insights to the wide array of topics commonly taught in the required professional responsibility course, including admission to the practice of law, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, representing entities, prosecutorial and criminal defense ethics, litigation and negotiation ethics, legal billing, and managerial and subordinate responsibilities. Behavioral legal ethics relies on empirical research to explore how lawyers actually make ethical decisions in context, rather than how they predict they would decide an ethical dilemma. This approach complements the law of lawyering by seeking to understand how various psychological factors and situational pressures explain and influence decision-making and resulting ethical (or unethical) action. Each chapter explores findings from behavioral science that pertain to ethical decision-making such as motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, fast thinking, the fundamental attribution error, wrongful obedience, conformity, moral disengagement, and much more. In addition, each chapter contains relevant case studies and reflection questions to deepen and cement students' understanding of the role of behavioral legal ethics in professional responsibility. Finally, the book offers ideas for individual attorneys and legal organizations to improve ethical decision-making. The book can be used as a stand-alone text in a required professional responsibility course, along with the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and select cases and materials, or it can be used as a supplement to a professional responsibility casebook. In addition, the book can be used in advanced legal ethics courses. The authors, both scholars in the field of behavioral legal ethics, are professional responsibility professors who have incorporated behavioral legal ethics into their own classrooms. They have found that students enjoy studying and discussing behavioral insights, and that integrating a behavioral focus to the study of legal ethics helps students better understand the ethical doctrines, policy, and context that underlie the law of lawyering and the ABA Model Rules. A sampling of student testimonials include: "I found the psychology of legal ethics extremely helpful. It really allowed me to focus in on the issues I know I will be challenged with when I enter the legal profession." "I liked how the course was not just putting the rule on the board and going over it, which I have heard some professors do. I liked looking at the rules through a behavioral science lens." "I appreciated the unique take from the behavioral sciences side." "It is kind of hard to imagine studying ethics without any mention of the psychological issues at this point."
In suggesting that general ethics be modeled on legal ethics, this book is a call for more creativity in our moral experience. Luizzi argues that lawyers regularly re-think their roles and the rules related to these roles. Their rejection of a prohibition on advertising, for example, was part of their re-thinking of the traditional view of the lawyer's noble calling, one for whom advertising was inappropriate. What this says for general ethics is that we are to become active participants in defining our roles. Our daily experiences can help us in constructing fresh and better conceptions to guide us. A Case for Legal Ethics rejects fixed conceptions of human nature and extends our constructive efforts beyond specific roles to human nature itself and to our environments. Luizzi appeals to role modeling, both to keep our constructed conceptions within moral bounds, and to develop the literature on moral education. We must be willing for others to imitate us as we live according to the conceptions we construct.
