A Modern Legal Ethics

Daniel Markovits proposes here a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. His book rejects the casuistry that dominates contemporary applied ethics in favour of an interpretive method that may be mimicked in other areas.

More than a discussion of professional regulation, this treatise addresses issues that every lawyer faces, such as conflict of interest, the client-lawyer relationship and confidentiality. In addition, specialized concerns are examined, including the role and responsibilities of lawyers as house counsel, government attorneys, mediators, prosecutors, and participants in the political process. This comprehensive survey also covers lawyer advertising, pro bono work, lawyer competence and other topics of modern practice. An entire chapter of this valuable reference is devoted to judges and the Judicial Code. Westlaw® queries are included.

Examining legal ethics within the framework of modern practice, this book identifies two important ethical issues that all lawyers confront: the difference between the role of lawyers and the role of judges in pursuing justice, and the conflicting responsibilities lawyers have to their clients and to the legal system more broadly. In addressing these issues, Legal Ethics provides an explanation of the duties and dilemmas common to practicing lawyers in modern legal systems throughout the world. The authors focus their analysis on lawyers in independent practice in modern capitalist constitutional regimes, including the United States, Japan, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the emerging legal systems in China and the former Soviet bloc, to develop connections between the legal profession and political systems based on the rule of law. They find that although ethical tension is inherent in the legal practice of all these societies, the legal profession is essential to stable political institutions.

Should a lawyer keep a client's secret even when disclosure would exculpate a person wrongly accused of crime? The Practice of Justice is a fresh look at this and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering.

This book draws an extended analogy with military theory to propose a new model for legal ethics.

"With guidelines on topics from ethics to office management, changes in payment technologies, managing client expectations, and gaining competence in new practice areas, this book will prepare you for lawyering in today's world and in tomorrow's"--

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was a leading figure in the Neo-Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He is also the inaugural figure for what is meant by "modern Jewish philosophy" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen’s striking claim that ethics is rooted in law – a claim developed in both his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes that neither Cohen’s systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions takes shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails.

This is the first collection of essays on legal ethics which addresses the subject comparatively. There is no similar work in the US. The empirical research from which the conference originally sprang remains a rare example of collaborative research between academic and practising lawyers.From the professor's side, public concern at the cost and quality of justice is forcing them to look beyond practitioners' manuals and the trade press for ideas.From the academic side there is great interest in the study of ethics and culture in the legal profession and the answers which this study may provide to wider questions concerning the content and practice of law at the access to justice debate.