Wanted: An Ethos of Personal Responsibility - Why Codes of Ethics and Schools of Law Don't Make for Ethical Lawyers

Abstract:     
This article: (1) argues that neither codes of professional ethics nor traditional modes of law school teaching do much to produce ethical lawyers; (2) asserts that ethics codes and the presuppositions of the adversary system work to alienate lawyers from a sense of individual responsibility; (3) critiques the conceptual connection between the adversary system and codes of lawyer ethics; (4) critiques the conventional approach to teaching legal ethics in law schools; (5) invokes the approach to ethical analysis championed by the German sociologist and social theorist Max Weber; and (6) explains how that approach, coupled with traditional tools of legal reasoning, can lead to an ethos of personal responsibility.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 19

Keywords: Legal Instruction, Law School, Ethics, Professional Responsibility, Legal Analysis, Social Theory, Max Weber, moral responsibility, morality

Accepted Paper Series