Law Commons^™

Common Issues Of Professional Responsibility, Thomas Ehrlich

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legal Ethics And The Good Client, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Modern ethics talks in terms of clients corrupting lawyers, and how lawyers must protect themselves from their client’s bad morals. This Article critiques that understanding and proposes that legal ethics is the study of what is good for a client, not what is good for the lawyer. Properly studied, it is thinking about the morals of someone else—the client. It is not thinking through the client’s conscience, but thinking through the lawyer’s conscience that seeks rectitude, freedom, and goodness for the client.

Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About The Law-As-Literature Movement, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Among other achievements, the modern law-as-literature movement has prompted increasing numbers of legal scholars to embrace the claim that adjudication is interpretation, and more specifically, that constitutional adjudication is interpretation of the Constitution. That adjudication is interpretation -- that an adjudicative act is an interpretive act -- more than any other central commitment, unifies the otherwise diverse strands of the legal and constitutional theory of the late twentieth century.

In this article, I will argue in this article against both modern forms of interpretivism. The analogue of law to literature, on which much of modern interpretivism is based, although fruitful, …