Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Abstract

Among members of the legal profession and judiciary throughout the world, there is a genuine concern with establishing and maintaining high ethical standards. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. Nor is it difficult to see that professional standards are not completely divorced from ordinary morality. Indeed, legal ethics and professional responsibility are more than a set of rules of good conduct; they are also a commitment to honesty, integrity, and service in the practice of law. In order to ensure that the standards established are the right ones, it is necessary first of all to examine important philosophical and policy issues, such as the need to reconsider the boundaries between, on the one hand, a lawyer's obligation to a client and, on the other, the public interest. It is also to be appreciated that conflicts of interest are pervasive and that all too often they are so common that they are not recognised as such. Yet rarely is public policy clearly cut. The book analyses the ethical rules pertaining to the judiciary, the Bar, and solicitors; it looks at the specific issues of confidentiality and the particular ethical problems in the family and criminal law jurisdictions; it finishes with a chapter which examines what lawyers may learn from looking at the study of medical ethics.