Online research in philosophy

This article explores the psychological literature on rationalization and connects it with contemporary questions about the role of in-house lawyers in ethical dilemmas. Using the case study of AWB Ltd, the exclusive marketer of Australian wheat exports overseas, it suggests that rationalizations were influential in the perpetuation by in-house lawyers of AWB's payment of kickbacks to the Iraqi regime. The article explores how lawyers' professional rationalizations can work together with commercial imperatives to prevent in-house lawyers from seeing ethical issues as those outside the organisation would see them. In particular, where lawyers over-identify with their client's commercial point of view and convince themselves that their role is primarily about providing 'technical' advice on commercial matters, wilful or unintended 'ethical blindness' can result. Lawyers can end up involved in or perpetuating serious misconduct by their client organizations.

In this article, Professor examine the evolution of modern concepts of proper professional conduct for lawyers. Professor Andrews looks at various forms of legal ethics standards, beginning with medieval European lawyer oaths and continuing to the ABA's most recent statement of standards in the "Ethics 2000 version of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct." She reports that the standards for centuries have reflected six "core duties" of lawyers - litigation fairness, competence, loyalty, confidentiality, reasonable fees, and public service. These six duties were the primary duties of lawyers in medieval England, and they continue as the central duties of modern lawyers under the ABA Model Rules. Ethics standards have evolved in subject matter, detail, and degree of enforcement, but the central elements of a lawyer's professional duty have remained substantially unchanged. Professor Andrews concludes by briefly assessing the meaning of both the continuation and the changes in the professional standards. Perhaps most important, the 800-year tradition of the core standards suggests that lawyers always have played an important role in society and that society demands integrity in that role.

David Luban (ed.), The Good Lawyer: Lawyers? Roles and Lawyers? Ethics. Maryland Studies in Public Philosophy. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984, 368 pp. Jennifer Radden, Madness and Reason: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Allen & Unwin, 1985, 174 pp.

The differences in business reactions to legal regulation, and the nature of business moralities, are examined through the eyes of an expert group — in-house lawyers. The research indicates that lawyers inevitably provide a degree of control through their technical expertise, but that they also identify strongly with their companies and emphasise shared ethics rather than ethical differences between lawyers and their employers. This can partly be explained by their integration with the company but also rests on the problematic nature of law and regulatory controls in relation to organisations within the community. In-house lawyers therefore reject a policing role in favour of a counselling role. Since they perceive themselves as part of a shared culture of ethics, they also avoid a leadership role. However, the article suggests that the nature of legal judgment should assist lawyers towards such a role, while recognising that organisational statesmanship must be constrained by organisational culture and the wider community culture of ethical standards.

This Essay describes the depiction of modern lawyers' professional ethics in literature, films, and television, and distinguishes between personal and professional character and specific acts. Depictions of lawyers in modern popular culture are more complex and nuanced than older treatments and allow law students, lawyers, and legal academics an opportunity to examine both ethical rule violations and "micro" behavioral choices, as well as character and more "macro" professional career choices and philosophies in a variety of contexts and serialized plot treatments. Treatments of professional ethics in more recent popular culture are also contrasted to more literary examinations of both lawyers' and other professionals' moral choices. Whether modern popular depictions of lawyers reveal more villains than heroes remains an interesting, if unanswerable question. Lawyers are more diverse in their demography and work settings, and the complexity of the sociology of ethical choices is now more often depicted than it was in the "golden age" of popular lawyer heroes.

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.

Me d i a lawyers were surveyed about their perceptions of journalism ethics, whether they discussed journalism ethics with their media clients, and whether they believed such nonlegal counseling were appropriate. The study found that most media lawyers do contribute to ethical decision making i n news organizations and believe the practice appropriate. It concludes that, as a result, indust y and academic proponents of journalistic ethics should target not only journalists but also media lawyers in their attempts to foster ethical decision making and public support for the news media.

In the recent spate of philosophers' writing on legal ethics, most contend that lawyers' professional role exposes them to great risk of moral wrongdoing; and some even conclude that the role's demands inevitably corrupt lawyers' characters. In assessing their arguments, I take up three questions: (1) whether philosophers' training and experience give them authority to scold lawyers; (2) whether anything substantive has emerged in the scolding that lawyers are morally bound to take to heart; and (3) whether lawyers ought to defer to philosophers' claims about moral principle. I return a negative answer to each.