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"Thinking Like A Lawyer" About Ethical Questions, William H. Simon
"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 …
Ethics, Professionalism, And Meaningful Work, William H. Simon
Ethics, Professionalism, And Meaningful Work, William H. Simon
Faculty Scholarship
Much of the anxiety and dissatisfaction associated with legal ethics arises from the categorical quality of the bar's dominant norms. These norms take the form of relatively inflexible rules insensitive to all but a few of the circumstances of the cases they govern. Hence they often require the lawyer to take actions that contribute to injustice or to refrain from actions that would avert injustice.
For example, many lawyers believe that a criminal defender is obliged to impeach a truthful complaining witness even though the only immediate purpose of this tactic is to encourage the trier to draw a mistaken …