In Search Of The Ethical Lawyer

What options did Paul Bernardo’s lawyer have when his client directed him to retrieve hidden evidence? Where would David Milgaard be today if a lawyer hadn’t doggedly challenged his murder conviction? And what should a defence lawyer do when told her client is a danger to the public? In this book, leading Canadian legal academics and practising lawyers draw on real-life stories to probe the tension between ethics and the law. Whether re-examining high-profile cases, celebrating barristers who tore down barriers, or pointing out current injustices within the justice system, their stories are compelling and raise important questions about what it takes to be a “good” lawyer.

What options did Paul Bernardo’s lawyer have when his client directed him to retrieve hidden evidence? Where would David Milgaard be today if a lawyer hadn’t doggedly challenged his murder conviction? And what should a defence lawyer do when told her client is a danger to the public? In this book, leading Canadian legal academics and practising lawyers draw on real-life stories to probe the tension between ethics and the law. Whether re-examining high-profile cases, celebrating barristers who tore down barriers, or pointing out current injustices within the justice system, their stories are compelling and raise important questions about what it takes to be a “good” lawyer.

Susan D. Carle centers this collection of texts on the premise that legal ethics should be far more than a set of rules on professional responsibility.

Changes in the way law is practiced, and who practices it, demand a new approach to legal ethics and professional responsibility--one that stresses personal responsibility over professional regulation. Hutchinsons book is an accessible introduction to the topic and a provocative call to arms for the profession. This edition includes analysis of the Canadian Bar Associations 2006 Code of Professional Conduct.

The law, Holmes said, is no brooding omnipresence in the sky. "If that is true," writes David Luban, "it is because we encounter the legal system in the form of flesh-and-blood human beings: the police if we are unlucky, but for the (marginally) luckier majority, the lawyers." For practical purposes, the lawyers are the law. In this comprehensive study of legal ethics, Luban examines the conflict between common morality and the lawyer's "role morality" under the adversary system and how this conflict becomes a social and political problem for a community. Using real examples and drawing extensively on case law, he develops a systematic philosophical treatment of the problem of role morality in legal practice. He then applies the argument to the problem of confidentiality, outlines an affordable system of legal services for the poor, and provides an in-depth philosophical treatment of ethical problems in public interest law.

The Ethical Lawyer: Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility is a guide to ethical conduct and client care which traces the developments in the field of legal ethics and professional responsibility that have occurred in New Zealand over the past 20 years and examines what it means to be an ethical lawyer in New Zealand today.The book also provides a highly readable resource for learning the rules governing professional conduct. Its primary purpose is to (a) focus on the key ethical issues that lawyers encounter on a day-to-day basis in their practices, and (b) give lawyers an easy-to-follo.