Law | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Whose Truth? Objective And Subjective Perspectives On Truthfulness In Advocacy, W. Bradley Wendel

W. Bradley Wendel

A lawyer confronts many features of the world that are given, inflexible, and must simply be dealt with; at the same time she has latitude for creativity, for the exercise of skill and judgment toward the realization of the client’s ends. Although in law school it may seem that the law that is open-textured, manipulable, and the wellspring of creative lawyering, in practice the facts do not come pre-packaged and accepted as true for the purposes of an appellate court’s review, but are highly contingent and the product of the interaction between a lawyer and witnesses, documents, and other sources …

Go to article

Value Pluralism In Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel

W. Bradley Wendel

My claim in this Article is that the foundational normative values of lawyering are substantively plural and, in many cases, incommensurable. By plural I mean that the ends served by the practice of lawyering are fundamentally diverse, and are therefore valued in different ways. Lawyers promote multiple worthwhile goals, including not only preserving individual liberty, speaking truth to power, showing mercy, and resisting oppression, but also enhancing order and stability in opposition to the “ill-considered passions” of democracy, aligning individual action with the public good, and shaping disputes for resolution by particular institutions such as courts and agencies. The claim …

Go to article