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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
How Must A Lawyer Be? A Response To Woolley And Wendel, David Luban
How Must A Lawyer Be? A Response To Woolley And Wendel, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Legal Ethics and Moral Character, 23 GEO. J. LEGAL Ethics, Alice Woolley and W. Bradley Wendel argue that theories of legal ethics may be evaluated by examining the kind of person a lawyer must be to conform to the normative demands of the theory. In their words, theories of legal ethics musts answer questions not only of what a lawyer must do, but how a lawyer must be. Woolley and Wendel examine three theories of legal ethics—those of Charles Fried, William Simon, and myself—and conclude that the theories they discuss impose demands on agency that are not realistic, functional, …
David Luban, Review Of Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy In A Democratic Age, David Luban
David Luban, Review Of Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy In A Democratic Age, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Daniel Markovits offers a novel defense of the traditional partisan advocate’s role, based on the demands of personal integrity. Although he insists that the adversary system requires lawyers to lie and cheat (regardless of the particular ethics rules in place), it is possible to redescribe these lawyerly vices as the virtue of fidelity to a client, expressed through what John Keats called “negative capability”—a suppression of the self in order to allow someone else’s story to shine forth. These are first-personal moral ideals, and Markovits argues against the primacy of second- and third-personal moral ideals (such as Kantianism and utilitarianism) …
The Lawyer's Role(S) In Deliberative Democracy, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
The Lawyer's Role(S) In Deliberative Democracy, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this paper I will explore the idea of a "neutral" lawyer who may have neither "client" (in the conventional sense of client) to represent nor advocacy to perform, yet still be functioning fully as a lawyer or "learned professional" schooled in the law. Indeed, in this paper I will suggest that lawyers may be especially useful in performing a variety of "new" functions that depart from traditional conceptions of the lawyer's role, but which lawyers may be especially well suited to perform. It may be counter-cultural to think of lawyers as "consensus builders," rather than as advocates or makers …
Reconsidering Legalism, Robin West
Reconsidering Legalism, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This essay is in the spirit of a friendly amendment. I have found Shklar's central arguments to be more compelling every time I have reread this book over the last twenty years. Nevertheless, I want to argue in this essay that in spite of Legalism's strengths, Shklar's core anthropological claim about the profession - more often asserted, rather than argued, throughout the book - that legalism, the attitudinal glue that binds lawyers professionally, consists of a commitment to the morality of rule abidance - is flawed, not because it is wrong, but because it is underinclusive. While legalism consists of …