The Zealous Advocacy of Justice in a Less Than Ideal Legal World

Abstract

In The Practice of Justice, William Simon addresses a widely recognized dilemma-the moral degradation of the legal profession that seems to be the unpleasant by-product of an adversarial system of resolving disputes-with a bold claim: Lawyers involved in either the representation of private rights or the public interest should be zealous advocates of justice, rather than their clients' interests. If lawyers were to do what this reorientation of their basic identity would dictate-that is, if lawyers were to zealously pursue justice according to law, rather than zealously pursue through all marginally lawful means whatever ends their clients happen to desire-the moral quality of litigation would improve,1 as would the reputation of the bar,2 and likewise the justice of the itself.3 But even more telling, for Simon, a system under which lawyers understood the of law to mean the practice of justice, rather than the zealous but amoral advocacy of clients' ends, would confer meaning and moral purpose in a life presently constructed so as to be dangerously devoid of both.4