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Nonlegal Regulation Of The Legal Profession: Social Norms In Professional Communities, W. Bradley Wendel

Vanderbilt Law Review

In this Article, Professor Wendel analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of community-based responses to unethical behavior by lawyers. The limits of formal legal regulation of the legal profession are well known. Additional questions have been raised about the efficacy of motivating lawyers to act ethically merely by giving appropriate instruction. What is left, therefore, is a complex and little-studied, but very real, array of informal sanctions. These sanctions are controlled by individual members of the professional community, not by the court or organized bar, and therefore operate largely without the transparency and procedural regularity of formal legal regimes. The advantage …