Legal Profession Commons^™

How And Why Do Lawyers Misbehave? Lawyers, Discipline, And Collegial Control, Lynn M. Mather

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 6 in The Paradox of Professionalism: Lawyers and the Possibility of Justice, Scott L. Cummings, ed.

A fundamental principle of professional labor is that the members of a specialized occupation, as professionals, enjoy autonomy. In sociologist Elliot Freidson's words, professionals “control their own work.” The practitioners themselves decide what constitutes acceptable or appropriate behavior. Professions establish rules and systems of self-regulation to teach and enforce the expected standards of conduct on their members. One way, then, to assess legal professionalism is to ask how well lawyers regulate themselves. The extensive literature on lawyer regulation paints a negative …