Legal Profession Commons^™

Should A Christian Lawyer Serve The Guilty?, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

People who teach or practice law are in some ways like public executioners or the Air Force officers who watch over the buttons that will send nuclear missiles into action: Other people, ordinary people, want to know what we do to overcome what seem to ordinary people to be moral obstacles to doing what we do.

What ordinary people say to lawyers, and what my students say when they first come to law school, when they are still more ordinary people than they are law students, is this: How can lawyers lend their skills and talents to the representation of …

Character And Community: Rispetto As A Virtue In The Tradition Of Italian-American Lawyers, Thomas L. Shaffer, Mary M. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Our project is to contemplate a discrete piece of applied ethics in the American legal profession, a piece of what one might call Italian-American legal ethics. We propose to describe a moral value for which we will use the Italian word rispetto. Our understanding of rispetto is that it is a virtue, a good habit, through which the person learns, practices, teaches, and remembers his place within the family. We will argue here that the practice of this virtue will allow a modern lawyer to be in and of his or her civic and professional community without loss of dignity …