Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Ethics & Professional Responsibility

We are obsessed with watching television shows and feature films about lawyers, reading legal thrillers, and following real-life trials. Yet, at the same time, most of us don't trust lawyers and hold them and the legal system in very low esteem.

In The Myth of Moral Justice, law professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum suggests that this paradox stems from the fact that citizens and the courts are at odds when it comes to their definitions of justice. With a lawyer's expertise and a novelist's sensability, Rosenbaum tackles complicated...

This collection cuts across conventional disciplinary boundaries to address the roles, responsibilities, and regulation of contemporary lawyers. Contributors address common concerns from diverse perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, political science, and organizational behavior. Topics include the...

In Germany, Otfried Hoffe has been a leading contributor to debates in moral, legal, political, and social philosophy for close to three decades. Hoffe's work (like that of his contemporary, Jurgen Habermas), brings into relief the relevance of these German discussions to their counterparts in English-language circles.

In this book, originally published in Germany in 1990 and expanded since, Hoffe proposes an extended and original interpretation of Kant' philosophy of law, and social morality. Hoffe articulates his reading of Kant in the context of an account of modernity as a...

The central question taken up by this essay collection is the degree to which judges have--or have not--served as protectors of human rights. Although the judiciary is nominally a part of the governing structure, it is also nearly always the case that it stands apart from the political actors who make and carry out policy. Thus, Gibney and Frankowski contend, judges have not designed or carried out the myriad human rights violations that are so common in the world today.

The key question asked in this volume is to what extent have courts merely abided by egregious practices, or perhaps...

Should a lawyer keep a client's secrets even when disclosure would exculpate a person wrongly accused of a crime? To what extent should a lawyer exploit loopholes in ways that enable clients to gain unintended advantages? When can lawyers justifiably make procedural maneuvers that defeat substantive rights? The Practice of Justice is a fresh look at these and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering. William Simon, a legal theorist with extensive experience in practice, charges that the profession's standard approach to these questions is incoherent and...

Anthony Kronman describes a spiritual crisis affecting the American legal profession, and attributes it to the collapse of what he calls the ideal of the lawyer-statesman: a set of values that prizes good judgment above technical competence and encourages a public-spirited devotion to the law.

For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those...

The law, Holmes said, is no brooding omnipresence in the sky. "If that is true," writes David Luban, "it is because we encounter the legal system in the form of flesh-and-blood human beings: the police if we are unlucky, but for the (marginally) luckier majority, the lawyers." For practical purposes, the lawyers are the law. In this comprehensive study of legal ethics, Luban examines the conflict between common morality and the lawyer's "role morality" under the adversary system and how this conflict becomes a social and political problem for a community.

Using real examples and...