A legal-ethical dilemma occurs when two legal duties conflict or, in the alternative, when a legal duty conflicts with a moral duty. Such dilemmas are inherent in the current regime for lawyers governing legal ethics in Manitoba. The problem is how best to resolve these dilemmas. In solving this problem, the secondary literature provides the theoretical framework. Four writers exemplify four different models of the adversarial system, the lawyer-client relationship and the context of criminal defence. The framework gleaned from the secondary literature is then used to analyse the primary sources of legal ethics in the Province of Manitoba. The Manitoba Law Society Act and Code of Professional Conduct are researched to their historical origins. The current Code of Conduct is compared with not only its antecedent but also its correlatives in other Canadian jurisdictions. The conclusion reached is that legal-ethical dilemmas are best resolved by lawyers with reference to common morality. Lawyers are to be heldpublicly accountable for decisions made and results obtained in their course of representing a client. To facilitate the transition to this method in legal-ethical reasoning there will have to be legislative and regulatory changes.
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.
The purchase of this ebook edition does not entitle you to receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on CasebookConnect. You will need to purchase a new print book to get access to the full experience, including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities; practice questions from your favorite study aids; an outline tool and other helpful resources. Many professional responsibility professors struggle to engage students in a required course, one that students wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to take, covering material that simultaneously appears both obvious and intricately technical. Ethical Lawyering: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned addresses those concerns with a fresh look at teaching and learning Professional Responsibility. Instead of containing impenetrable cases typical of most professional responsibility casebooks, which force students and teachers to sort out convoluted facts and incomplete or out-of-date analysis, this book “flips the classroom” by providing detailed explanations of the Model Rules, accompanied by problems for class discussion that require students to explore how the Rules apply in real-world situations—a structure which lends itself easily to both in-person and online courses. The book’s explanations are focused on building statutory interpretation skills, and then bringing these skills to common practice scenarios. Discussion covers all aspects of the law governing lawyers, from professional discipline to civil liability to court sanctions, as well as informal concerns, such as client relations and the business of law practice. Professors and students will benefit from: A “flipped classroom” structure in which the book provides detailed explanations of the Model Rules, interspersed with problems for class discussion, that are both drawn from practice and illustrate some of the challenges in applying the rules in real-world situations. MPRE-style multiple-choice review questions at the end of each chapter (or after substantial portions of a chapter) addressing the material. An informal, irreverent, down to earth, and conversational style, meant to be accessible, crafted to engage students without understating the seriousness of the subject matter, and to encourage them to put themselves into the “hot seats” that the problems describe. A statutory construction approach to the Model Rules, designed to build text-interpretation skills. A comprehensive treatment of the law regulating lawyers, considering all of the practical hazards that lawyers face, and illustrating the connections between the Model Rules as a basis for professional discipline and the law of torts (fiduciary duty and malpractice), contracts (scope of the attorney-client relationship and engagement agreements), agency (authority), and procedure (sanctions), as well as informal concerns such as client relations and reputational issues. A digital edition that includes links to all necessary statutory materials. Teaching materials Include: A detailed Teacher’s Manual, including: Suggested syllabi for two-hour and three-hour courses. Detailed analyses of all of the problems, including pedagogical suggestions, to stimulate class discussion. Explanatory answers to the MPRE-style multiple-choice review questions. Suggested PowerPoints for class use. Two online-only chapters (The Government Lawyer; Judicial Ethics).
Should a lawyer keep a client's secret even when disclosure would exculpate a person wrongly accused of crime? The Practice of Justice is a fresh look at this and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering.
How do lawyers resolve ethical dilemmas in the everyday context of their practice? What are the issues that commonly arise, and how do lawyers determine the best ways to resolve them? Until recently, efforts to answer these questions have focused primarily on rules and legal doctrine rather than the real-life situations lawyers face in legal practice. The first book to present empirical research on ethical decision making in a variety of practice contexts, including corporate litigation, securities, immigration, and divorce law, Lawyers in Practice fills a substantial gap in the existing literature. Following an introduction emphasizing the increasing importance of understanding context in the legal profession, contributions focus on ethical dilemmas ranging from relatively narrow ethical issues to broader problems of professionalism, including the prosecutor’s obligation to disclose evidence, the management of conflicts of interest, and loyalty to clients and the court. Each chapter details the resolution of a dilemma from the practitioner’s point of view that is, in turn, set within a particular community of practice. Timely and practical, this book should be required reading for law students as well as students and scholars of law and society.
Buy a new version of this textbook and receive access to the Connected eBook with Study Center on CasebookConnect, including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities; practice questions from your favorite study aids; an outline tool and other helpful resources. Connected eBooks provide what you need most to be successful in your law school classes. Learn more about Connected eBooks Traversing the Ethical Minefield: Problems, Law, and Professional Responsibility, Fourth Edition offers students accessible, teachable problems and notes that clarify and encourage analysis of the law governing lawyers. The book’s innovative pedagogy (combination of relevant and interesting problems faced by fictitious law firm “Martyn and Fox,” cases, ethics opinions, thematic notes, and short stories) supports its focus of teaching the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers as well as conveying the complexities of ethical dilemmas in legal practice. The book’s manageable length makes it short enough to provide focus, but long enough to convey the rich texture of the material.
THE CONSCIENCE OF JUDGES AND APPLICA nON OF LEGAL RULES The book is devoted to the problem of the influence of moral judgements on the result of judicial decision-making in the process of application of the established (positive) law. It is the conscience of judges that takes the central place in the research. Conscience is understood in the meaning developed in the theory of Thomas Aquinas as the complex capacity of the human being to make moral judgements which represent acts of reason on the question of what is right or wrong in a particular situation. The reason why we need a theory of conscience in making judicial decisions lies in the nature of the positive law itself. On the one hand, there is an intrinsic conflict between the law as the body of rigid rules and the law as an living experience of those who are involved in social relationships. This conflict particularly finds its expression in the collision of strict justice and equity. The idea of equity does not reject the importance of rules in legal life. What is rejected is an idolatrous attitude to the rules when the uniqueness of a human being, his well being and happiness are disregarded and sacrificed in order to fulfil the observance of the rules. The rules themselves are neither good or bad. What makes them good or bad is their application.
The law, Holmes said, is no brooding omnipresence in the sky. "If that is true," writes David Luban, "it is because we encounter the legal system in the form of flesh-and-blood human beings: the police if we are unlucky, but for the (marginally) luckier majority, the lawyers." For practical purposes, the lawyers are the law. In this comprehensive study of legal ethics, Luban examines the conflict between common morality and the lawyer's "role morality" under the adversary system and how this conflict becomes a social and political problem for a community. Using real examples and drawing extensively on case law, he develops a systematic philosophical treatment of the problem of role morality in legal practice. He then applies the argument to the problem of confidentiality, outlines an affordable system of legal services for the poor, and provides an in-depth philosophical treatment of ethical problems in public interest law.
Ethics and regulation have become catchwords of the late 1990s, yet relatively little has been written about the ethical discourse and regulation of the legal professions in England and Wales. This book represents the first attempt to subject the ethical discourse of the English legal professions to in-depth analysis and sustained critique. Drawing on insights from moral philosophy, social theory, the sociology of the legal profession, public law theories of regulation, and the extensive American literature on lawyers' ethics, it argues that, in seeking to provide definitive answers to particular problems of professional conduct, professional legal ethics has failed to deliver an approach which requires lawyers actively to engage with the ethical issues raised by legal practice. Through an analysis of the core issues facing lawyers, the authors locate this failure in the profession's reliance on a liberal and adversarial role morality that conceptualises the ethical values of human dignity, autonomy and equality in a formalistic and narrowly legalistic manner. This encourages lawyers to overlook the real invasions of these values so often wrought by upholding clients legal rights, and to ignore the competing claims of affected third parties, the wider community and the environment In seeking to move beyond critique, the authors develop throughout the book a contextual approach to individual ethical decision-making and outline a range of institutional, regulatory and educational reforms which, they suggest, could form the basis for a more ethical brand of professionalism. Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis written for lawyers, ethicists and policy-makers interested in this neglected area of professional ethics and regulation.
