Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Noblesse Oblige Tradition In The Practice Of Law, David Luban

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1905 Louis D. Brandeis delivered a talk entitled The Opportunity in the Law to the Harvard Ethical Society.' It was delivered as a pep talk, what Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy, seventy-six years later, would refer to as "the old address to the troops." Brandeis hoped to rally law students to his vision of the moral possibilities of legal practice-specifically, the elite corporate legal practice into which Brandeis could assume his audience would enter. Brandeis was concerned that elite lawyers were becoming thralls of robber-baron capitalists, that they were ignoring the possibilities of law practice as a kind of …