Integrity in Zealousness: Comparing the Standard Conceptions of the Canadian and American Lawyer

Abstract

Since the late 1970s American law journals have published literally thousands of articles on the problem of lawyers’ ethics. In these articles American scholars lament the current state of the legal profession and suggest that something has gone seriously wrong with legal practice and with the way lawyers conceive the ideals and norms of that practice. A few defenders of current ethical standards remain, but the dominant tone of current scholarship is highly critical of lawyers’ seeming ability to remove their “professional” actions from the scrutiny of basic precepts of ordinary morality. In contrast with this American proliferation of critical perspectives on legal ethics, little Canadian scholarship on the subject of lawyers’ ethics exists; as Gavin MacKenzie put it in his 1993 guide to lawyers’ professional responsibility and discipline, Canadian literature on legal ethics is “embarrassingly sparse”. A few American articles on legal ethics have been published in Canadian