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Bad Apples, Bad Lawyers Or Bad Decisionmaking: Lessons From Psychology And From Lawyers In The Dock, Leslie C. Levin

Leslie C. Levin

Richard Abel’s book, Lawyers in the Dock: Learning from Attorney Disciplinary Proceedings, presents six detailed case studies of New York lawyers who engaged in serious misconduct. He uses these case studies to carefully explore the social, psychological and structural conditions of lawyer deviance that lead to betrayals of trust. This essay considers what additional light some of the psychological literature, in particular, might shed on the behaviors of Abel’s lawyers for the purposes of better understanding how to prevent lawyer misconduct. More specifically, it considers how social and psychological processes may help to explain the trajectory of lawyer misconduct and …