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Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Legal Profession

2014

PDF

Journal

Ethics

Florida State University Law Review

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Cost Of Avoidance: Pluralism, Neutrality, And The Foundations Of Modern Legal Ethics, Melissa Mortazavi Oct 2014

The Cost Of Avoidance: Pluralism, Neutrality, And The Foundations Of Modern Legal Ethics, Melissa Mortazavi

Florida State University Law Review

This Article offers an answer to key questions in modern American legal ethics: when and why did the legal profession stop talking about professional conduct in moral terms? Mining the history of current rules governing lawyer conduct, this Article reveals that while the 1969 Model Code of Professional Responsibility sought to revolutionize legal ethics by creating a professional code that was more transparent, democratized, and less hierarchical than the preceding 1908 Canons of Legal Ethics, that effort also excised a moral understanding of lawyering in order to facilitate a particular understanding of pluralism.

The drafters of the 1969 Model Code …