Law Commons^™

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …

Authoritarian Legal Ethics: Bradley Wendel And The Positivist Turn, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In this Review, I respond to the authoritarian theme in Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. In essence, I argue: neither libertarianism nor authoritarianism is a plausible starting point for a general approach to legal ethics. It is a great virtue of Ronald Dworkin’s jurisprudence that it suggests a conception of law and legal ethics that does not depend on either perspective. Moreover, it suggests a conception of lawyer responsibility that is more plausible than either Emersonianism or moralistic positivism. By gesturing toward positivism and by surrendering to less reflective authoritarian impulses, Wendel’s argument underestimates the extent to which social …