Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

This collection of essays by leading judges, professional lawyers and academics, should be of interest to anyone concerned with legal ethics and professional responsibility generally.

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Among members of the legal profession and judiciary throughout the world, there is a genuine concern with establishing and maintaining high ethical standards. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. Nor is it difficult to see the professional standards are not completely divorced from ordinary morality. Indeed, legal ethics and professional responsibility are more than a set of rules of good conduct; they are also a commitment to honesty, integrity, and service in the practice of law. In order to ensure that the standards established are the right ones, it is necessary first of all to examine important philosophical and policy issues, such as the need to reconsider the boundaries between, on the one hand, a lawyer's obligation to a client and, on the other, the public interest. It is also to be appreciated that conflicts of interest are pervasive and that all too often they are so common that they are not recognized as such. Yet rarely is public policy clearly cut.

The underlying themes of this book are: BL that the move to more definite rules is not only inevitable but also desirable

BL that existing codes of professional practice cannot simply be treated as a system of specific rules

BL that the current set of ethical rules is contestable and requires further refinement, perhaps even radical surgery

BL and that legal ethics must be conceived in the more general area of professional responsibility

The wider ethical issues of the operation of the legal profession as a whole are now firmly on the agenda. Both law schools and law professionals have a role to play in developing acceptable standards in this area and it is therefore appropriate that the essays in this volume are written by a distinguished group of law teachers and practitioners together with senior members of the judiciary.

The book opens with an overview chapter, followed by three chapters analysing the ethical rules pertaining to the judiciary, the Bar, and solicitors, written by, respectively, the Master of the Rolls, Anthony Thornton, and Alison Crawley and Christopher Bramall. The following three chapters look at the specific issues of confidentiality (Michael Brindle and Guy Dehn) and the particular ethical problems in the family and criminal law jurisdictions (Sir Alan Ward and Professor Andrew Ashworth respectively). Chapter 8, by Sir Alan Paterson, discusses the teaching of legal ethics, whilst Chapters 9 and 10, by Marc Galanter, Thomas Palay, and Cyril Glasser put the subject in its wider social and professional context. The book finishes with a chapter which examines what lawyers may learn from looking at the study of medical ethics.