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Ethos And Conscience—A Rejoinder, Daniel S. Kleinberger
Ethos And Conscience—A Rejoinder, Daniel S. Kleinberger
Faculty Scholarship
In “Wanted: An Ethos of Personal Responsibility,” Professor Kleinberger sought to prompt debate about the moral preconceptions of the legal profession. Professor Morawetz responded in his essay, “Layers and Conscience.” This article responds, commenting on Morawetz’s arguments that (1) excessive pessimism about lawyer morality is unfounded and counterproductive; (2) the public’s antipathy toward lawyers is inevitable given the role lawyers play in our society; (3) codes of ethics can and do have an uplifting influence on the morals of lawyers; and (4) law schools can and do train moral judgment.
Wanted: An Ethos Of Personal Responsibility—Why Codes Of Ethics And Schools Of Law Don't Make For Ethical Lawyers, Daniel S. Kleinberger
Wanted: An Ethos Of Personal Responsibility—Why Codes Of Ethics And Schools Of Law Don't Make For Ethical Lawyers, Daniel S. Kleinberger
Faculty Scholarship
This article: (1) argues that neither codes of professional ethics nor traditional modes of law school teaching do much to produce ethical lawyers; (2) asserts that ethics codes and the presuppositions of the adversary system work to alienate lawyers from a sense of individual responsibility; (3) critiques the conceptual connection between the adversary system and codes of lawyer ethics; (4) critiques the conventional approach to teaching legal ethics in law schools; (5) invokes the approach to ethical analysis championed by the German sociologist and social theorist Max Weber; and (6) explains how that approach, coupled with traditional tools of legal …