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Full-Text Articles in Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
The Role Of Norms In Modern-Day Government Ethics, Veronica Root Martinez
The Role Of Norms In Modern-Day Government Ethics, Veronica Root Martinez
Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars, policymakers, advocacy groups, members of the media, and citizens-at-large are lamenting the perceived decrease in adherence to norms and ethics by certain government officials over the past few years. Informal mechanisms—whether they be norms, ethics, customs, or a “gentleman’s word”—have long been relied upon to ensure certain standards of behavior within all aspects of society. The American government is no exception. From America’s founding, the rule of law created the backstop for its governmental processes, but the virtue of its leaders remained a constant component of its success. To be fair, the country has seen more than its …
Fiduciary Legal Ethics, Zeal, And Moral Activism, David Luban
Fiduciary Legal Ethics, Zeal, And Moral Activism, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The recent turn to fiduciary theory among private lawyer scholars suggests that "lawyer as fiduciary" may provide a fresh justification for legal ethics distinct from moral and political accounts propounded by theorists in recent decades. This Article examines the justification and limits of fiduciary legal ethics. In the course of the investigation, it argues that the fiduciary relation of lawyer to client as defined in the ethics codes does not align perfectly with fiduciary principles in other legal domains, such as agency, trust, or corporate law. Lawyers are fiduciaries of their clients. Does that mean lawyers can never throttle back …
Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel
Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, …
Toward A Jurisprudence Of Law, Peace, Justice, And A Tilt Toward Non-Violent And Empathic Means Of Human Problem Solving, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Toward A Jurisprudence Of Law, Peace, Justice, And A Tilt Toward Non-Violent And Empathic Means Of Human Problem Solving, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this essay the author sets out some questions about whether law can be made a site of encouraging more positive, peace seeking, non-violent, and pro-social behaviors. These questions derive from my own family history, as well as from my experience as a social and political activist, and also as a practicing lawyer and legal scholar. She begins in the introduction by setting out these questions in light of current conditions of domestic and international violence and some past considerations of categories of law. In the second section of this essay the author explains where her questions come from—her personal …
Civility And Collegiality—Unreasonable Judicial Expectations For Lawyers As Officers Of The Court?, Lonnie T. Brown
Civility And Collegiality—Unreasonable Judicial Expectations For Lawyers As Officers Of The Court?, Lonnie T. Brown
Scholarly Works
It is a well-settled and often-recited fact that lawyers are “officers of the court.” That title, however, is notoriously hortatory and devoid of meaning. Nevertheless, the Eleventh Circuit recently took the somewhat unprecedented step of utilizing the officer-of-the-court label to, in effect, sanction an attorney for the purportedly uncivil act of failing to provide defendant attorneys with pre-suit notice. While the author applauds the court’s desire to place greater emphasis on lawyer-to-lawyer collegiality as a component of officer-of-the-court status, the uncertainty the decision creates in terms of a lawyer’s role will potentially force litigators to compromise important client-centered duties. This …
Philosophical Legal Ethics: Ethics, Morals, And Jurisprudence, Katherine R. Kruse
Philosophical Legal Ethics: Ethics, Morals, And Jurisprudence, Katherine R. Kruse
Scholarly Works
The authors and moderator David Luban participated in a plenary session of the International Legal Ethics Conference IV, held at Stanford. Each author answered and discussed questions arising from short papers they had written about the principal concern of legal ethics was the morality of lawyers, the morality of clients, or the morality of laws.
The Jurisprudential Turn In Legal Ethics, Katherine R. Kruse
The Jurisprudential Turn In Legal Ethics, Katherine R. Kruse
Scholarly Works
When legal ethics developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1970s, its theoretical roots were in moral philosophy. The early theorists in legal ethics were moral philosophers by training, and they explored legal ethics as a branch of moral philosophy. From the vantage point of moral philosophy, lawyers’ professional duties comprised a system of moral duties that governed lawyers in their professional lives, a “role-morality” for lawyers that competed with ordinary moral duties. In defining this “role-morality,” the moral philosophers accepted the premise that “good lawyers” are professionally obligated to pursue the interests of their clients all the way to …
Engaged Client-Centered Representation And The Moral Foundations Of The Lawyer-Client Relationship, Katherine R. Kruse
Engaged Client-Centered Representation And The Moral Foundations Of The Lawyer-Client Relationship, Katherine R. Kruse
Scholarly Works
The field of legal ethics, as we know it today, has grown out of thoughtful, systematic grounding of lawyers’ duties in a comprehensive understanding of lawyers’ roles and the situating of lawyers’ roles in underlying theories of law, morality, and justice. Unfortunately, in the process, the field of theoretical legal ethics has mostly lost track of the thing that Freedman insisted was at the heart of a lawyers’ role: the integrity of the lawyer-client relationship. As I will discuss, the field of theoretical legal ethics has developed in ways that are deeply lawyer-centered rather than fundamentally client-centered. I am going …
The Human Dignity Of Clients, Katherine R. Kruse
The Human Dignity Of Clients, Katherine R. Kruse
Scholarly Works
This essay reviews David Luban's forthcoming book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. At the heart of this new book is an argument that interactions between lawyers and clients ought to be at the center of jurisprudential inquiry. Pointing out that most cases do not go to trial and that much transactional work occurs outside the litigation context, he argues that law's defining moments occur when a "client sketches out a problem and a lawyer tenders advice," rather than when a judge decides a litigant's case. This review essay examines how Luban might elaborate a new "jurisprudence of lawyering" by examining …
The Human Dignity Of Clients, Kate Kruse
The Human Dignity Of Clients, Kate Kruse
Faculty Scholarship
This essay reviews David Luban's forthcoming book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. At the heart of this new book is an argument that interactions between lawyers and clients ought to be at the center of jurisprudential inquiry. Pointing out that most cases do not go to trial and that much transactional work occurs outside the litigation context, he argues that law's defining moments occur when a "client sketches out a problem and a lawyer tenders advice," rather than when a judge decides a litigant's case. This review essay examines how Luban might elaborate a new "jurisprudence of lawyering" by examining …
On International And Interdisciplinary Legal Ethics Scholarship, W. Bradley Wendel
On International And Interdisciplinary Legal Ethics Scholarship, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
"Legal Ethics is an international and interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the field of legal ethics." The mission statement of this journal poses three concise challenges for scholars in this discipline: To define the domain of legal ethics, to study it from a perspective that is valid across jurisdictional boundaries, and to incorporate the insights of related disciplines. As befits an emerging and exciting field, lawyers and university faculty throughout the English- speaking common-law world have begun to engage with all three of these problems. The book reviews section of Legal Ethics has highlighted the publication of many of the …
Reason And Authority In Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel
Reason And Authority In Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Jurisprudence Noire, Pierre Schlag
Legal Ethics And Jurisprudence From Within Religious Congregations, Thomas L. Shaffer
Legal Ethics And Jurisprudence From Within Religious Congregations, Thomas L. Shaffer
Journal Articles
The Rabbis of the Talmud were a community for moral discernment—a community commissioned by God to interpret the Word of God. Their story is theology. Michael Scanlon, a modem Roman Catholic thinker, assumes such a theology and adds anthropology.
The Rabbis assume and Scanlon describes a community for ethical discernment. It is a perception—somewhat empirical, somewhat theological—that is important and neglected for lawyers in academic jurisprudence and in religious legal ethics. My argument here is that what lawyers should do about "ethical dilemmas" in professional practice can be discerned in the sort of community the Talmud describes, and Scanlon describes, …
Disqualification Of Counsel: The Westinghouse Litigation, Anthony D'Amato
Disqualification Of Counsel: The Westinghouse Litigation, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
The motion to disqualify counsel is becoming increasingly important in pre-trial strategy. Discusses one case arising out of Westinghouse Electric Corporation's alleged breach of longterm uranium supply contracts, in which a disqualification motion was sustained against Westinghouse's counsel, Kirkland & Ellis.