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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Lawyers As Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer
Lawyers As Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer
Journal Articles
Legal ethics is about injustice. My effort here is part of the broad, modern academic enterprise, and of the broad, modern professional enterprise now usually called professional responsibility. Both date from the Watergate scandal in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, and the rejection, by legal academics and practicing lawyers, of the behavior of the President and other lawyers in that affair. Our modern enterprise, like the biblical Exodus, was born in outrage at the abuse of legal power.
In university law schools such as this one, legal ethics is now a discipline characterized by schools of thought on …
Lawyers And Biblical Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer
Lawyers And Biblical Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer
Journal Articles
This is part of a broader exploration of the suggestion that the biblical prophets-Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Nathan, and the others-are sources of ethical reflection and moral example for modern American lawyers. The suggestion appears to be unusual; I am not sure why.
The Prophets were, more than anything else, lawyers-as their successors, the Rabbis of the Talmud, were. They were neither teachers nor bureaucrats, not elected officials or priests or preachers. And the comparison is not an ancient curiosity:
Much of what admirable lawyer-heroes have done in modern America has been prophetic in the biblical sense-that is, what they …