A Modern Legal Ethics

by Markovits, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780691121628
• ISBN10: 0691121621
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-29
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

A Modern Legal Ethicsproposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally.Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to cheat on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers' lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally,A Modern Legal Ethicsreintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers' central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy.Throughout, the book rejects the casuistry that dominates contemporary applied ethics in favor of an interpretive method that may be mimicked in other areas. Moreover, because lawyers practice at the hinge of modern morals and politics, the book's interpretive insights identify--in an unusually pure and intense form--the moral and political conditions of all modernity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Adversary Advocacy
The Wellsprings of Legal Ethics	p. 25
The Lawyerly Vices	p. 44
The Seeds of a Lawyerly Virtue	p. 79
Integrity
Introducing Integrity	p. 103
An Impartialist Rejoinder?	p. 118
Integrity and the First Person	p. 134
Comedy or Tragedy?
Integration through Role	p. 155
Lawyerly Fidelity and Political Legitimacy	p. 171
Tragic Villains	p. 212
Postscript	p. 247
Notes	p. 255
Index of Cases Cited	p. 341
Index of Model Rules and Other Authorities	p. 347
Index of Subjects	p. 351
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