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Full-Text Articles in Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel Jul 2017

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, …


The Natural Law Tradition On The Modern Supreme Court: Not Burke, But The Enlightenment Tradition Represented By Locke, Madison, And Marshall., R. Randall Kelso Jan 1995

The Natural Law Tradition On The Modern Supreme Court: Not Burke, But The Enlightenment Tradition Represented By Locke, Madison, And Marshall., R. Randall Kelso

St. Mary's Law Journal

A traditional common-law style of judicial decisionmaking exists which was present at this nation’s founding. This common law style is derived from natural law tradition. And this tradition stands as an alternative to the formalism of Justice Scalia or the Holmesian style of Chief Justice Rehnquist. This natural law style, with its focus on the religious and communitarian ethical tradition, was the dominant view of judicial interpretation for the framing and ratifying generation of the original Constitution and the Civil War Amendments. The decisionmaking style of Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter appears to have great affinity with this traditional common-law …