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Professional Responsibility: Education And Enforcement, Robert H. Aronson

Washington Law Review

The failure of the Bar to regulate effectively the ethical conduct of its members is not solely the failure of law school teaching methodology. A much more serious deficiency-and one far more difficult to resolve—concerns the way lawyers perceive and attempt to enforce professional responsibility. Instead of providing an analytical framework which the individual lawyer can employ in considering problems arising in practice, the legal profession has chosen a series of ambiguous and only tangentially related rules which are often contradictory or misleading. Because these situation-oriented rules do not clearly encompass even a majority of the myriad factors potentially relevant …