Law Commons^™

Law-Givers, Story-Tellers, And Dubin’S Legal Heroes: The Emerging Dichotomy In Legal Ethics (Video Review), Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Two camps have begun to emerge from the rich ferment in legal ethics teaching and scholarship over the last twenty years. The first group, whose members might be termed “law-givers,” consists of those who view legal ethics as chiefly concerned with the identification, transmission, and enforcement of uniform standards governing the conduct of lawyers. The second group—considerably smaller, but increasingly well-defined—might be called the “story-tellers.” The story-tellers place a higher value on persons and context than on principles and procedures, and on the cultivation of a deeper, less mechanical sense of professionalism than detailed rules can provide.

Larry Dubin’s most …

Professional Ethics Opinion 89-1, Propriety Of Non-Lawyer Employees' Names On Letterheads And Business Cards, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

A lawyer or law firm may include on its letterhead and business cards the names and titles of its nonlawyer employees, so long as the letterhead or business card describes such employees as nonlawyers.

Lawyers As Officers Of The Court, Eugene R. Gaetke

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Lawyers like to refer to themselves as officers of the court. Careful analysis of the role of the lawyer within the adversarial legal system reveals the characterization to be vacuous and unduly self-laudatory. It confuses lawyers and misleads the public. The profession, therefore, should either stop using the officer of the court characterization or give meaning to it. This Article proposes certain modifications of the existing rules of professional responsibility that would bring lawyers' actual obligations more in line with those suggested by the label of officer of the court.

The Professional Ethics Of Individualism And Tragedy In Martin Arrowsmith's Expedition To St. Hubert, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was a resolute critic of pretension in American business and in the professions. His only hero story is the story of a physician and research scientist, Arrowsmith (1925).' It is a story that puts up for examination Lewis's prescription for a moral life in the professions in America and, beyond that, it shows what professional life is like. I want to argue here that (1) although the story is useful for lawyers and for legal ethics, Lewis's principal moral prescription, a brief for individualism in professional life, is incoherent. The ethic of individualism, as Lewis grounds it, …