Code Of Professional Responsibility Research Articles

Ethical issues when a dentist with an active practice dies

Ethical issues when a dentist with an active practice dies

Dental and medical advertising: comparative analysis of the rules of professional conduct

ABSTRACT In health care professional activities, advertising is an issue that raises serious discussions and is the cause of some ethical suits in professional entities, since every advertising should follow the provisions of the Code of Professional Responsibility. Therefore, this research study aimed at analyzing, comparing and discussing articles related to advertising and marketing, considering the current regulations from dental and medical entities. In Dentistry, this subject is ruled by the Code of Professional Conduct, Chapter XVI, ‘From advertising and marketing’. In Medicine, information is found in two regulations and in several chapters of the Code of Medical Ethics and in Resolution No. 1.974/2011 of the Federal Council of Medicine, which establishes the guiding criteria for medical advertising. The three regulations present articles that refers to participation in mass media, required information in advertisements, use of sensationalism and self-promotion, and publishing of unproven specialties and titles, highlighting the importance of these topics. The medical regulation also includes participation in publishing ads of manufacturing companies and an exclusive committee to deal with advertising and marketing issues, topics that are not considered in the dental regulation.

Towards Recognizing and Accommodating Differentiation within the Legal Profession: A Critique of the Code of Professional Responsibility’s Treatment of the Non-Litigation Practice of Law

This paper’s focal argument is that the Code of Professional Responsibility, the singular document laying down the fundamental imperatives of lawyers’ conduct in the Philippines, does not sufficiently address the emergent exigencies of the legal profession, particularly with regard to the advent of non-litigation practice areas. Due to its focus on the lawyer’s duties as an advocate, it fails to reflect the demographics of the local legal profession and the trends in the international legal community, both pointing to the pressing need to extend the regulatory arm of the bar to other practice areas. This paper will first examine the genesis, evolution, and content of the Code of Professional Responsibility, and then present the historical and legal bases for the argument aforementioned. By way of conclusion, this paper will forward short-term, medium-term, and long-term propositions geared towards the recognition and accommodation of a bar that has become increasingly differentiated.

Lawyers and the War

This article reviews legal advice provided by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Office of Legal Counsel officials John Yoo and Jack Goldsmith during the war on terrorism. It differs from the other works on this subject in two key respects. First, it includes detailed analyses of their conduct under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and other pertinent legal ethics codes, such as the D.C. Bar Rules, the Code of Professional Responsibility, and the A.L.I.’s Restatement of the Law of Lawyering, as well as under the Department of Justice’s tradition of providing independent advice to the White House and other executive agencies. Second, it examines their own narratives of the crisis, as reflected in their published memoirs. Providing advice concerning the inter-relationships among international law, the law of war, constitutional law, and federal criminal statutory law requires cautious analysis of constitutional, treaty and statutory language, as well as judicial and executive precedent. The article concludes that Ashcroft and Yoo were ill-suited for their roles, each for different reasons. Ashcroft acted as a policy advocate and politician, while Yoo was an unyielding exponent of an extreme constitutional theory concerning executive power and was unwilling or unable to provide pragmatic lawyering advice. Goldsmith, however, recognized that Ashcroft’s lax oversight and Yoo’s aggressive theories opened the door to the repudiation of applicable domestic and international law and mistreatment of detainees. The article concludes that Goldsmith was both a better lawyer and a better soldier in the war on terrorism, as the failings of Ashcroft and Yoo weakened support for Bush administration policies, led to losses in the courts, and may have weakened our ability to respond to terrorism in the future.

Divorce Lawyers at Work: Varieties of Professionalism in Practice

The authors look at how divorce lawyers actually work to address the question of legal professionalism in practice. Through a detailed and systematic study of legal practice at the micro level, they show how lawyers create their own controls over work through their social relationships, formal and informal norms, common knowledge, and shared values. While much of the research on legal professionalism centers on the formal standards of the bar as reflected in codes of professional responsibility, Mather et al. show how the discretionary judgments that lawyers make, and the choices they face, are actually understood in relation to norms and standards of other lawyers with whom they interact or compare themselves.

Codes of Professional Responsibility: Ethics Standards in Business, Health, and Law, 4th edition

Codes of Professional Responsibility: Ethics Standards in Business, Health, and Law, 4th edition

Codes of Professional Responsibility (Book)

Codes of Professional Responsibility (Book)

Book Review: Codes of Professional Responsibility

Book Review: Codes of Professional Responsibility

Codes of Professional Responsibility (2nd Ed.) (Book)

Codes of Professional Responsibility (2nd Ed.) (Book)

Codes of Professional Responsibility. Rena A. Gorlin

<i>Codes of Professional Responsibility</i>. Rena A. Gorlin

Pedagogy Without Purpose: An Essay on Professional Responsibility Courses and Casebooks

The involvement of so many attorneys in the Watergate scandal caused the bar to wonder how to better train ethical lawyers. The American Bar Association instituted an accreditation requirement that law schools compel their students to take a professional responsibility course. Additionally, many states began requiring passage of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination as a condition for admission to the bar. These actions, however, were taken with little thought about how legal ethics should be studied. Rather, the assumption has been that a lawyer is ethical if he or she knows the Code of Professional Responsibility and can demonstrate that knowledge on a multiple choice test. I believe that such an approach to professional responsibility, emphasizing just learning the Code, is largely useless. Memorizing a few rules has little relation to ethical practice. In fact, such an approach is counterproductiveinstead of encouraging students to consider the difficult issues confronting all lawyers, it lets them feel content merely to learn a handful of canons and disciplinary rules. To illustrate how pervasive this approach to legal ethics is, and how empty, I want to focus on three major casebooks on professional responsibility that have been published in the past two years. They are selected because they are extensively used and therefore likely reflect how professional responsibility

Training the Ethical Lawyer: A Rejoinder to Schneyer: [Reply/Rejoinder

Is there a sick patient? I think that the real disagreement between Professor Schneyer and me is over whether there is a problem in the way professional responsibility courses traditionally are taught. My analysis is based on the observation that legal ethics classes often are viewed by teachers and, especially, students as neither useful nor effective. I suggest that courses which primarily emphasize teaching students the codes of professional responsibility are neglecting basic moral questions about the role of the lawyer that should be the focus of professional ethics classes. Schneyer apparently begins with the premise that there is no major problem with this part of the curriculum; his essay is an enthusiastic defense of current courses and casebooks.1 He explicitly defends the desirability of legal ethics courses that emphasize teaching the professional codes.2 This divergence in starting points explains our different views of the books I reviewed.3 I look at the books and see texts primarily directed to teaching the codes;4 books that do not adequately encourage students to question the moral duties of an attorney; books that disproportionately emphasize problems confronting the litigator; books that do not focus enough on examining the method of professional regulation. Schneyer looks at the books and generally likes what he sees. The few passages on the role of the attorney in socie-

The Ethics of Corporate Lawyers: A Sociological Approach

The American Bar Association is considering a revision of its Code of Professional Responsibility. One revision deals specifically with lawyers whose clients are organizations; it attempts to delineate the ethical responsibilities of such lawyers when they discover an employee or a member of one of their clients is engaged in wrongdoing on the organization's behalf. Because the proposal suggests that corporate counsel may be justified in public disclosure of the wrongdoing when the organization itself fails to rectify the problem, it has sparked much controversy in the profession and much speculation as to whether and when corporate counsel will “blow the whistle.” The article offers a sociological perspective on the act of a corporate counsel's public disclosure of organizational wrongdoing. The act of disclosure is treated as a social behavior, the likelihood of which is increased or decreased by a number of factors including the attorney's awareness of the wrongdoing, the attorney's orientations to the larger profession, the structure of the professional practice setting within which the counsel is located, and the supports for disclosure offered by the legal profession through its formal organizations. These factors are described and then combined into a general predictive model of disclosure by corporate counsel. A concluding discussion of the general ramifications of the proposed revisions focuses on the social implications of the attorney-client privilege, in which the client is as unique an actor as is the large organization.

Professional Ethics: A New Code for Lawyers?

T he American public has come to recognize, as the legal profession has long been aware, that the paradigm lawyer is not Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow, but the low-profile specialist working with a large law firm; that the paradigm client is not the solitary individual in trouble, but the corporation; and that the paradigm legal activity is not a dramatic courtroom battle, but behind-the-scenes advice, document drafting, and deal-making. The business of lawyers, to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge, is mostly business. Business is not exactly the most trusted American institution these days, and this has had its effect on the public's perception of lawyers. The public suspects that lawyers find ways for their corporate clients to evade laws and regulations, and generally to further their own interests at the expense of the common good. Few lawyers would regard this picture as accurate; nevertheless, the professional literature on legal ethics has devoted increasing attention to situations in which the obligation to protect third parties from a client may dilute a lawyer's loyalty to the client. Some of these involve corporate clients; many do not. All are highly controversial. The controversy within the profession has focused on a draft proposal for a new code of professional ethics, which incorporates more third-party protections than the existing Code of Professional Responsibility. The Bar is not eager to bind itself to rules that it sees diluting the lawyer's loyalty to the client. Partly, of course, this stems from an understandable desire not to bite the hand that feeds (and feeds well); but the motive is ethical as well, deriving from the Bar's deep tradition of client loyalty. It is unclear that the American Bar Association (ABA) will pass the new Rules. This, I wish to argue, would be unfortunate, because the draft proposal is an intel-

The Death and Regeneration of Ethics

The American Bar Association's Commission on Evaluation of Professional Standards has proposed the replacement of the existing Code of Professional Responsibility with its Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The public discussion of the Model Rules has focused largely on specific provisions, such as the proposed requirement that lawyers disclose clients' confidences in some circumstances and the exhortation that all lawyers engage in pro bono activity. Another proposed change, however, would at least on its face seem to be more significant for the future of the bar's professional standards and its self-concept than for the resolution of particular professional dilemmas. That change is the proposed elimination of about half the current Code of Professional Responsibility: those provisions included under the rubric “Ethical Considerations.”

Disclosure Provisions of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct

The intense debate surrounding the proposed Model Rules of Professional Conduct centers primarily on those provisions that permit, or require, the disclosure by lawyers of information that is presently shielded from production by Canon 4 of the Code of Professional Responsibility. Indeed, were it not for the disclosure provisions, which many critics decry as fundamentally altering the lawyer-client relationship, the proposed Model Rules might have generated widespread support, or perhaps indifference, from most segments of the bar.

The Model Rules and Problems of Code Interpretation and Enforcement

Regulating lawyers is a three-part process. Rules must be formulated, they must be interpreted, and they must be enforced. Although those who formulate rules cannot be held responsible for their interpretation and enforcement, they can and should bring to their work an appreciation of the problems experienced in interpreting and enforcing earlier rules. One way to evaluate the proposed Model Rules of Professional Conduct is to ask whether they are properly responsive to problems that have arisen in interpreting and enforcing the Code of Professional Responsibility. That is the standard against which the Model Rules will be measured in this review. No effort, however, will be made to canvass all the problems that have been identified under the Code.

A Basic Guide to Medicolegal Reference Sources

“Support a lawyer. go to med school” The above message on the car bumper stickers of members of the medical profession reflects their reaction to the current escalation of malpractice suits filed by attorneys against doctors and hospitals. The impact of these suits against medical personnel and institutions is not limited to patients, doctors and lawyers; the ripple‐effect reaches the entire community, because the rising incidence of malpractice suits tends to increase the cost of malpractice insurance and ultimately the total cost of health care to all members of society. Malpractice is but a small, though highly visible, part of a broader spectrum of interaction between medicine and law. “The complexities of modern society are causing law and medicine to interface with increasing frequency to the extent that contact with the legal process has become an inescapable aspect of the physician's life.” In recognition of this increasing frequency of contacts between medicine and law, a correspondingly increasing number of medicolegal reference works have been published, as exemplified by the selective list which follows this introduction. These should be of direct interest to doctors and members of allied health professions, to attorneys and paralegals and, indirectly, to all who deal with medical personnel and institutions. Traditionally, attorneys, particularly members of the trial bar, have demonstrated a continuing interest in medical literature. For example, the Merck Manual and Goldstein's Medical Trial Technique are familiar to most trial lawyers. They are expected to be well acquainted with anatomy charts, texts on internal medicine, eye, ear, nose and throat, orthopedics, obstetrics, and pediatrics, to name but a few generic medical works of interest to trial lawyers. It should be noted that the lawyer's interest in medical literature is not necessarily motivated by a desire to harass doctors, nurses and hospitals. Attorneys are bound by their Code of Professional Responsibility to represent their clients competently and zealously. In discharging this ethical obligation, the attorney frequently calls upon a physician to testify as an expert witness concerning the cause of a personal injury or death. Consequently, the attorney should be knowledgeable in medical theory and terminology. Furthermore, in pursuit of interdisciplinary competence, a significant number of individuals in the United States have earned both the medical degree and the law degree and appropriate licenses to practice, e.g., Cyril Wecht, M.D., J.D., Director, Pittsburgh Institute of Legal Medicine, Duquesne Law School, member, Faculty of the Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Dentistry, Coroner, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

Code of Professional Responsibility

Code of Professional Responsibility