Law Commons^™

The Lawyer As Citizen, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

The moral schizophrenia of the lawyer-person wrought by the American adversarial system's differentiation of professional morality from personal morality is at once alienating and anesthetizing. Alienating in that it separates a person from her/his actions taken in performing a professional role by attributing responsibility for these actions and their consequences to the role itself rather than to the individual. Anesthetizing in that it permits if not requires a professional to constrict the moral universe inhabited on the job, extruding moral sentiments that she/he otherwise might feel, numbing the moral sense of ordinary personal responsibility.