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Lawyers In The Moral Maze , Mark A. Sargent
Lawyers In The Moral Maze , Mark A. Sargent
Working Paper Series
This article overviews the various forms of lawyer complicity in illegal or immoral behavior by corporate managers in the corporate scandals of the last three years, but focuses primarily on the question of why lawyers so often seemed willing to engage in or ignore behavior that presumably violated their own personal moral codes (whether religious or secular) as well as their professional role morality. The article draws on Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes (1988) for an answer derived from the sociology of corporate bureaucracies. Jackall's case studies of corporate managers found that managers adhered to the moral "rules-in-use" developed in their …
Lawyers In The Perfect Storm, Mark A. Sargent
Lawyers In The Perfect Storm, Mark A. Sargent
Working Paper Series
The multiple corporate collapses and scandals of recent years, for which "Enron" is a convenient shorthand, resulted from a perfect storm in which regulatory oversight, the law of fiduciary duty, gatekeepers, market discipline, and contractual incentives all failed to prevent gross self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and deception, or themselves produced perverse consequences. The story of this simultaneous failure of the structures in place since the New Deal and before, has received considerable attention in both the popular and scholarly literature, but is summarized here to provide a context for consideration of the contributions that lawyers made to the perfect storm. …