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Gatekeepers, Cultural Captives, Or Knaves? Corporate Lawyers Through Different Lenses, Donald C. Langevoort
Gatekeepers, Cultural Captives, Or Knaves? Corporate Lawyers Through Different Lenses, Donald C. Langevoort
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Studying the behavior of high-status corporate lawyers is challenging. Much writing (including some of my own) addresses the risk of lawyer enabling of client misconduct by drawing from work in behavioral ethics suggesting that at least some apparent complicity is without full awareness of the impropriety. Is this naïve? The first part of this essay pushes harder on consciousness by looking more closely at the lengthy continuum—not a binary yes/no—in the awareness of wrongdoing risk as heavily influenced by the “slippery slope.” Looking at corporate lawyers’ professional responsibility through this lens has some interesting, and as far as I can …
The Zealous Advocacy Of Justice In A Less Than Ideal Legal World, Robin West
The Zealous Advocacy Of Justice In A Less Than Ideal Legal World, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In The Practice of Justice, William Simon addresses a widely recognized dilemma -- the moral degradation of the legal profession that seems to be the unpleasant by-product of an adversarial system of resolving disputes -- with a bold claim: Lawyers involved in either the representation of private rights or the public interest should be zealous advocates of justice, rather than their clients' interests. If lawyers were to do what this reorientation of their basic identity would dictate -- that is, if lawyers were to zealously pursue justice according to law, rather than zealously pursue through all marginally lawful means whatever …