Should a lawyer keep a client's secrets even when disclosure would exculpate a person wrongly accused of a crime? To what extent should a lawyer exploit loopholes in ways that enable clients to gain unintended advantages? When can lawyers justifiably make procedural maneuvers that defeat substantive rights? The Practice of Justice is a fresh look at these and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering. William Simon, a legal theorist with extensive experience in practice, charges that the profession's standard approach to these questions is incoherent and implausible.
At the same time, Simon rejects the ethical approaches most frequently proposed by the profession's critics. The problem, he insists, does not lie in the profession's commitment to legal values over those of ordinary morality. Nor does it arise from the adversary system. Rather, Simon shows that the critical weakness of the standard approach is its reliance on a distinctive style of judgment--categorical, rule-bound, rigid--that is both ethically unattractive and rejected by most modern legal thought outside the realm of legal ethics. He develops an alternative approach based on a different, more contextual, style of judgment widely accepted in other areas of legal thought.
The author enlivens his argument with discussions of actual cases, including the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal and the Leo Frank murder trial, as well as fictional accounts of lawyering, including Kafka's The Trial and the movie The Verdict.
- 264 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Information
Publisher
Harvard University PressYear
2009Print ISBN
9780674002753
9780674697119
eBook ISBN
9780674043664
Table of contents
- Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. A Right to Injustice
- 3. Justice in the Long Run
- 4. Should Lawyers Obey the Law?
- 5. Legal Professionalism as Meaningful Work
- 6. Legal Ethics as Contextual Judgememt
- 7. Is Criminal Defense Different?
- 8. Institutionalizing Ethics
- Notes
- Further Reading
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Practice of Justice by William H. Simon in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Law & Ethics & Professional Responsibility in Law. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.