Jurisprudence Commons^™

Structuring The Ethics Of Prosecutorial Trial Practice: Can Prosecutors Do Justice?, Fred C. Zacharias

Vanderbilt Law Review

Codes of professional responsibility take a very different approach to civil and criminal trials. In civil litigation, the codes presume that good outcomes result when lawyers represent clients aggressively. In criminal cases, the codes do not rely as fully on competitive lawyering. They treat prosecutors as advocates, but also as "ministers" having an ethical duty to "do justice."

Although the special prosecutorial duty is worded so vaguely that it obviously requires further explanation, the codes provide remarkably little guidance on its meaning. In effect, code drafters have delegated to prosecutors the task of resolving the special ethical issues prosecutors face …