Law Commons^™

Abandoning An "Unethical" System Of Legal Ethics, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

It is time to abandon the pretense of "legal ethics" as an independent lawyer-run system and to design a civil liability system in which lawyers can be held accountable to wronged clients at reasonable costs with ready access and fair modes of proof. To the extent that the system of ethics actually caused lawyers to act "ethically" (which is a major and largely unsupportable supposition), the competitive dynamics of the legal profession, coupled with the significant decline in values, honesty, and accountability in American society, have rendered even that historically suspect system illegitimate. This does not mean that there are …