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 study of legal ethics and the legal profession has emerged as a distinct and important field of scholarship over the years. This book offers contemporary and non-mainstream perspectives on the shape of the legal profession. It examines how the public sees lawyers and how lawyers see their own profession.
A text for lawyers and students of law which explores theoretical foundations, professional ethical requirements, the lawyer-client relationship, conflicts of interest, duties to the administration of justice, and duties in legal practice. The NZ Law Society's 'Rules of Professional Conduct' 1998 are included. Webb lectures in Law at Victoria University.
Examining legal ethics within the framework of modern practice, this book identifies two important ethical issues that all lawyers confront: the difference between the role of lawyers and the role of judges in pursuing justice, and the conflicting responsibilities lawyers have to their clients and to the legal system more broadly. In addressing these issues, Legal Ethics provides an explanation of the duties and dilemmas common to practicing lawyers in modern legal systems throughout the world. The authors focus their analysis on lawyers in independent practice in modern capitalist constitutional regimes, including the United States, Japan, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the emerging legal systems in China and the former Soviet bloc, to develop connections between the legal profession and political systems based on the rule of law. They find that although ethical tension is inherent in the legal practice of all these societies, the legal profession is essential to stable political institutions.
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.
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.
Even lawyers who obey the law often seem to act unethically--interfering with the discovery of truth, subverting justice, and inflicting harm on innocent people. Standard arguments within legal ethics attempt to show why it is permissible to do something as a lawyer that it would be wrong to do as an ordinary person. But in the view of most critics these arguments fail to turn wrongs into rights. Even many lawyers think legal ethics is flawed because it does not accurately describe the considerable moral value of their work. In Lawyers and Fidelity to Law, Bradley Wendel introduces a new conception of legal ethics that addresses the concerns of lawyers and their critics alike. Wendel proposes an ethics grounded on the political value of law as a collective achievement that settles intractable conflicts, allowing people who disagree profoundly to live together in a peaceful, stable society. Lawyers must be loyal and competent client representatives, Wendel argues, but these obligations must always be exercised within the law that constitutes their own roles and confers rights and duties upon their clients. Lawyers act unethically when they treat the law as an inconvenient obstacle to be worked around and when they twist and distort it to help their clients do what they are not legally entitled to do. Lawyers and Fidelity to Law challenges lawyers and their critics to reconsider the nature and value of ethical representation.
Among members of the legal profession and judiciary throughout the world, there is a genuine concern with establishing and maintaining high ethical standards. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. Nor is it difficult to see the professional standards are not completelydivorced from ordinary morality. Indeed, legal ethics and professional responsibility are more than a set of rules of good conduct; they are also a commitment to honesty, integrity, and service in the practice of law. In order to ensure that the standards established are the right ones, it isnecessary first of all to examine important philosophical and policy issues, such as the need to reconsider the boundaries between, on the one hand, a lawyer's obligation to a client and, on the other, the public interest. It is also to be appreciated that conflicts of interest are pervasive andthat all too often they are so common that they are not recognized as such. Yet rarely is public policy clearly cut. The underlying themes of this book are: * that the move to more definite rules is not only inevitable but also desirable * that existing codes of professional practice cannot simply be treated as a system of specific rules * that the current set of ethical rules is contestable and requires further refinement, perhaps even radical surgery * and that legal ethics must be conceived in the more general area of professional responsibility The wider ethical issues of the operation of the legal profession as a whole are now firmly on the agenda. Both law schools and law professionals have a role to play in developing acceptable standards in this area and it is therefore appropriate that the essays in this volume are written by adistinguished group of law teachers and practitioners together with senior members of the judiciary. The book opens with an overview chapter, followed by three chapters analysing the ethical rules pertaining to the judiciary, the Bar, and solicitors, written by, respectively, the Master of the Rolls, Anthony Thornton, and Alison Crawley and Christopher Bramall. The following three chapters lookat the specific issues of confidentiality (Michael Brindle and Guy Dehn) and the particular ethical problems in the family and criminal law jurisdictions (Sir Alan Ward and Professor Andrew Ashworth respectively). Chapter 8, by Sir Alan Paterson, discusses the teaching of legal ethics, whilstChapters 9 and 10, by Marc Galanter, Thomas Palay, and Cyril Glasser put the subject in its wider social and professional context. The book finishes with a chapter which examines what lawyers may learn from looking at the study of medical ethics.
Susan D. Carle centers this collection of texts on the premise that legal ethics should be far more than a set of rules on professional responsibility.
