Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons^™

The Thomas Hearings: Watching Ourselves, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

Inaugural Howard Lichtenstein Lecture In Legal Ethics: Lawyer Professionalism As A Moral Argument, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The recurrent movement to call or recall lawyers to professionalism is a moral argument. It is an argument made to individual lawyers, a claim among lawyers, that professionalism has to do with being a good person.

I see two aspects to the claim that professionalism is a moral value: one aspect says to a person "be professional." It is an admonition to virtue. The other aspect says to a person, "be in the profession—be of it," with an appeal that seems familiar from other admonitions we have heard to align ourselves with groups that are supposed to make us better …

Teaching Professional Responsibility And Professionalism In Legal Writing, Margaret Z. Johns

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Professionalism: Rekindled, Reconsidered Or Reformulated?, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

It is increasingly commonplace for bar officials and others to decry what they see as a decline in "professionalism" among lawyers in recent years. For example, in 1984, former Chief Justice Warren Burger gave a speech to an ABA meeting in Las Vegas in which he chastised some members of the profession for taking their freedom to advertise as a "release from all professional restraints," as they use the "same modes of advertising as other commodities from mustard, cosmetics and laxatives to used cars.' 1 Catchy phrases, attractive well-dressed lawyers, and special rates on lossleader items are but some of …

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, …

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.

Ethics: Professionalism, Craft, And Failure, James R. Elkins

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

A First-Year Course In The "Lawyering Process", Paul Brest

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Misconduct Of The Trial Attorney, William L. Libby

Cleveland State Law Review

An attorney is licensed and is sworn as an officer of the court. Common law proclaims him to be a "minister of justice in aid of the court." Attorneys are the chief instruments of the Anglo-American system of law. An attorney at a trial is not a contestant like unto a gladiator seeking to prevail at any cost. His cause of action, as well as his opponent's, depends upon a fair and impartially conducted trial. The jury's verdict should be based upon the issues made by the pleadings and evidence, and not upon deceptions created by misconduct.