Law Commons^™

Moral Pluck: Legal Ethics In Popular Culture, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Favorable portrayals of lawyers in popular culture tend to adopt a distinctive ethical perspective. This perspective departs radically from the premises of the "Conformist Moralism" exemplified by the official ethics of the American bar and the arguments of the proponents of President Clinton's impeachment. While Conformist Moralism is strongly authoritarian and categorical, popular culture exalts a quality that might be called "Moral Pluck " – a combination of resourcefulness and transgression in the service of basic but informal values. This Essay traces the theme of Moral Pluck through three of the most prominent fictional portrayals of lawyers in recent years …

"Thinking Like A Lawyer" About Ethical Questions, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Suppose you had to pick the two most influential events in the recent emergence of ethics as a subject of serious reflection by the bar. Most likely, you would name the Watergate affair of 1974 and the appearance a few years earlier of an article by Monroe Freedman. The article was a discussion of what Freedman called the "Three Hardest Questions" surrounding the responsibilities of criminal defense lawyers^.

Of the two events, Watergate is the most famous but, for our purposes, the least important. It raised no challenging issues of professional responsibility. The lawyer conduct in Watergate that shocked …

The Ideology Of Advocacy: Procedural Justice And Professional Ethics, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional morality frowns at the ethics of advocacy. Public opinion disapproves of what it considers the lawyer's most characteristic activities. Popular culture can reconcile itself to him only by pretending that all his clients are virtuous. The lawyer's response takes the form of a dialectic of cynicism and naiveté. On one hand, he sees his more degrading activities as licensed by a fundamental amorality lying beneath conventional morality. On the other hand, he sees his more heartening ones as serving an institutional justice higher than conventional morality. The two moods divide the profession as a whole, and the division can …