Law Commons^™

Ethical Lawyering: The Role Of Honor, Conscience, And Codes (Reviewing Michael S. Ariens, The Lawyer’S Conscience: A History Of American Lawyer Ethics), Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Michael Ariens’ new book, The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics, is a monumental work, rooted in his decades of excellent scholarship in the fields of attorney professional responsibility and legal history. The Lawyer’s Conscience captures the great sweep and key features of the roughly 250-year period in American legal ethics running from colonial times to the present day. Richly detailed and vividly presented, the story takes the reader on a grand tour of the landmark events and changing ideas that have defined the aspirations, responsibilities, and accountability of members of the American legal profession.

Anti-Discrimination Ethics Rules And The Legal Profession, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

“Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behaviour. How shall I gain a Reputation! How shall I Spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished Genius, Learning, and Virtue.” So wrote twenty-four-year-old John Adams in his diary in 1759. He had been a licensed lawyer for just three years at that time and had already believed himself to be hounded by “Petty foggers” and “dirty Dablers in the Law”—unlicensed attorneys who, Adams claimed, fomented vexatious litigation for the fees they might earn.

Adams believed his embrace of virtue, along with genius …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

Philosophical Legal Ethics: An Affectionate History, David Luban, W. Bradley Wendel

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, …

Lost And Found - David Hoffman And The History Of American Legal Ethics, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty CLE

David Hoffman was a successful Baltimore lawyer who wrote the first study of American law in 1817 and authored the first maxims of American legal ethics. Yet for more than a century after his death, Hoffman was a forgotten figure to American lawyers. Beginning in the late 1970s, Hoffman was re-discovered, and his writings on legal ethics have been favorably cited.

How and why was Hoffman “lost” to American law for over a century, and why he was “found”? Hoffman was lost to history because his view of ethics was premised on republican virtue, specifically the concept of honor. A …

In Defense Of Scholars' Briefs: A Response To Richard Fallon, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In a thoughtful and provocative essay, Richard Fallon criticizes law professors for lightly signing onto 'scholars’ briefs,' that is, amicus briefs filed on behalf of a group of law professors claiming expertise in the subject area. Fallon argues that law professors are constrained by the moral and ethical obligations of their profession from joining scholars’ briefs without first satisfying standards similar to those governing the production of scholarship, and thus he believes that law professors should abstain from adding their names to such briefs more often than they do now.

This response begins by describing the benefits of scholars’ briefs …

Misplaced Fidelity, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper is a review essay of W. Bradley Wendel's Lawyers and Fidelity to Law, part of a symposium on Wendel's book. Parts I and II aim to situate Wendel's book within the literature on philosophical or theoretical legal ethics. I focus on two points: Wendel's argument that legal ethics should be examined through the lens of political theory rather than moral philosophy, and his emphasis on the role law plays in setting terms of social coexistence in the midst of moral pluralism. Both of these themes lead him to reject viewing legal ethics as an instance of "the …

The Jurisprudential Turn In Legal Ethics, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

When legal ethics developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1970s, its theoretical roots were in moral philosophy. The early theorists in legal ethics were moral philosophers by training, and they explored legal ethics as a branch of moral philosophy. From the vantage point of moral philosophy, lawyers’ professional duties comprised a system of moral duties that governed lawyers in their professional lives, a “role-morality” for lawyers that competed with ordinary moral duties. In defining this “role-morality,” the moral philosophers accepted the premise that “good lawyers” are professionally obligated to pursue the interests of their clients all the way to …

Philosophical Legal Ethics: Ethics, Morals, And Jurisprudence, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

The authors and moderator David Luban participated in a plenary session of the International Legal Ethics Conference IV, held at Stanford. Each author answered and discussed questions arising from short papers they had written about the principal concern of legal ethics was the morality of lawyers, the morality of clients, or the morality of laws.

The Limits Of Process, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article presents four major objections to Jeremy Waldron’s claim that for “Rule of Law” to exist it we must move beyond basic formal requirements that laws be general and knowable rules we can all comply with, towards substantive requirements that when the law imposes its censorial and punitive will upon us, it is applied in a way that acknowledges our intelligence and respects our individual dignity. After challenging Waldron’s claim, the author suggests that if Rule of Law theorizing is intended to capture our ideals of law, then the three paradigms of Rule of Law scholarship that Waldron has …

Obligation To Obey The Law: A Study Of The Death Of Socrates, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

Do we have an obligation to obey any law, no matter how unjust or evil, provided only that it is in fact a valid rule of the legal system in which we happen to be physically located? Reassessment of the relation between law and ethics justifies a new look at the classic statement of legal obligation: the death of Socrates found in the dialogues of Plato. Three possible bases for an ethical obligation to obey the law are examined.

How Must A Lawyer Be? A Response To Woolley And Wendel, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Legal Ethics and Moral Character, 23 GEO. J. LEGAL Ethics, Alice Woolley and W. Bradley Wendel argue that theories of legal ethics may be evaluated by examining the kind of person a lawyer must be to conform to the normative demands of the theory. In their words, theories of legal ethics musts answer questions not only of what a lawyer must do, but how a lawyer must be. Woolley and Wendel examine three theories of legal ethics—those of Charles Fried, William Simon, and myself—and conclude that the theories they discuss impose demands on agency that are not realistic, functional, …

David Luban, Review Of Daniel Markovits, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy In A Democratic Age, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Daniel Markovits offers a novel defense of the traditional partisan advocate’s role, based on the demands of personal integrity. Although he insists that the adversary system requires lawyers to lie and cheat (regardless of the particular ethics rules in place), it is possible to redescribe these lawyerly vices as the virtue of fidelity to a client, expressed through what John Keats called “negative capability”—a suppression of the self in order to allow someone else’s story to shine forth. These are first-personal moral ideals, and Markovits argues against the primacy of second- and third-personal moral ideals (such as Kantianism and utilitarianism) …

Institutional And Individual Justification In Legal Ethics: The Problem Of Client Selection, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Economic Rationality Vs. Ethical Reasonableness: The Relevance Of Law And Economics For Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Civil Obedience, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Discussions of legal ethics generally assume that lawyers should deliberate straightforwardly on the basis of reasons to act or refrain from acting. This model of deliberation fails to account for the role of the law in resolving normative disagreement and coordinating social activity by people who do not share comprehensive ethical doctrines. The law represents a collective decision about what citizens ought to do, which replaces the reasons individuals would otherwise have to act. This Article contends that legal ethics ought to be understood as an aspect of this theory of the authority of law. On this account, lawyers have …

Lawyers As Prophets, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Legal ethics is about injustice. My effort here is part of the broad, modern academic enterprise, and of the broad, modern professional enterprise now usually called professional responsibility. Both date from the Watergate scandal in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, and the rejection, by legal academics and practicing lawyers, of the behavior of the President and other lawyers in that affair. Our modern enterprise, like the biblical Exodus, was born in outrage at the abuse of legal power.

In university law schools such as this one, legal ethics is now a discipline characterized by schools of thought on …

A Midrash On Rabbi Shaffer And Rabbi Trollope, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who' wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as "left of center," Shaffer is a complex …

Nonlegal Regulation Of The Legal Profession: Social Norms In Professional Communities, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What should be done about lawyers who persist in violating ethical norms that are not embodied in positive disciplinary rules? That question has been a recurrent theme in recent legal ethics scholarship. One response has been to propose, experiment, amend, tinker, draft, comment, and redraft, in an attempt to codify the standard of conduct observed to be flouted widely by the practicing bar. Bar associations and courts are seemingly engaged in a never-ending process of promulgating new codes of professional conduct or rules of procedure under which lawyers may be sanctioned for such conduct as bringing frivolous lawsuits, abusing the …

Is Meaningful Regulation Of Lawyers In Multidisciplinary Firms Possible?, Denise D. J. Roy

Faculty Scholarship

If the legal profession embraces multidisciplinary practice (MDP) and allows fee-sharing with nonlawyers, there is a risk that its values, independence, and professionalism will fall prey to market pressures and control by outsiders. On the other hand, rejecting MDP means risking losing business to the multidisciplinary firms already established. The question is whether there is a compromise that provides meaningful regulation of lawyers practicing in multidisciplinary firms.

Is The Rule Of Law Cosmopolitan?, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

What I will argue in the bulk of the paper is that whether or not the rule of law implies ethical cosmopolitanism depends: it depends on how we understand or interpret the legalistic sense of justice that law and the rule of law seemingly require. The virtue that we sometimes call legal justice, and the correlative meaning of the rule of law to which it is yoked, can plausibly be subjected to a range of different interpretations, each resting on quite different understandings of the point of law and of what the individual law is meant to protect. Some of …

Public Values And Professional Responsibility, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Perjury: An Anthology, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Professor Underwood takes an in-depth look at the occurrence of perjury from ancient Rome to the O.J. Simpson trial. This journey through time provides insight into the motives of perjurers, the difficulties involved in catching them; and the alarming frequency with which they succeed, unchastised.

False Witness: A Lawyer's History Of The Law Of Perjury, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

From Cain to Potiphar's Wife to the pig and chicken laws of the Lex Salica of Clovis I, Professor Underwood examines the role of the false witness throughout history. Take a voyage extraordinaire and encounter some of history's most notorious perjurers.

Rediscovering The Republican Origins Of The Legal Ethics Codes, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

Many commentators wrongly assume that the hired gun ideal is the foundation of our legal ethics codes. This article explains that this assumption is based on an historical mistake that has consequences for interpreting the modern codes. Judge George Sharswood, the nineteenth century scholar whose work provided the basis for the 1908 A.B.A. Canons of Ethics, had a republican conception that rejected the adversarial ethic in favor of a more nuanced conception that combined loyalty to clients with a thick obligation to the public good that both bounded client representation and required lawyers to provide political leadership. Although the emphasis …

Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among other achievements, the modern law-as-literature movement has prompted increasing numbers of legal scholars to embrace the claim that adjudication is interpretation, and more specifically, that constitutional adjudication is interpretation of the Constitution. That adjudication is interpretation -- that an adjudicative act is an interpretive act -- more than any other central commitment, unifies the otherwise diverse strands of the legal and constitutional theory of the late twentieth century.

In this article, I will argue in this article against both modern forms of interpretivism. The analogue of law to literature, on which much of modern interpretivism is based, although fruitful, …

Whither Jurisprudence?, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

After considering the side road of critical legal studies, I shall try to indicate the major signposts to a more complete jurisprudence. These signposts take the form of questions or anomalies in our present understanding of law. I will conclude that only by following these signposts, by exploring these questions and anomalies, will we begin to uncover the nature of law and justice.

David Hoffman's Law School Lectures, 1822-1833, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The Baltimore lawyer and teacher David Hoffman (1784-1854), the father of American legal ethics, was also the first of the systematic American legal educators. He held one of the first appointments in this country as a university law professor (at the University of Maryland, 1814-43) and wrote the first American outline of the study of law. Joseph Story, in a contemporary review of the 1817 Course, called Hoffman's work "an honour to our country[,] . . . by far the most perfect system for the study of the law that has ever been offered to the public. " Chancellor James …

Disqualification Of Counsel: The Westinghouse Litigation, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

The motion to disqualify counsel is becoming increasingly important in pre-trial strategy. Discusses one case arising out of Westinghouse Electric Corporation's alleged breach of long­term uranium supply contracts, in which a disqualification motion was sustained against Westinghouse's counsel, Kirkland & Ellis.