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The Past, The Present, And Future Of Legal Ethics: Three Comments For David Luban, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

David Luban helped invent the field of legal ethics some years ago; Legal Ethics and Human Dignity provides an opportunity to assess how it has developed. By way of both homage and critique, I offer three comments on central issues that the book raises: the nature of the moral foundations of lawyers' ethics; the relation of legal and ordinary moral norms in legal ethics decisions; and the relation of ethical norms and organization.

I associate the issue of moral foundations with the past because modern academic discussion of legal ethics began with this focus. The relationship between law and morals …