"May a Good Lawyer be as well a Good Human?" The Prospects of Moral Ethics from the Point of view of Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Scholarly discourse on the theoretical underpinnings of lawyer's professional ethics began in the US academic community in the 1970s. Its first decades, a period usually referred to as the first wave of theoretical legal ethics, were dominated by moral philosophical approaches. Theorists focused on the individual lawyer as a moral agent and addressed the principal question of how to reconcile the lawyer's professional role morality and ordinary or common morality, when they seemingly conflict. Is it possible to live a virtuous and respectable life while adhering to the traditional amoral role of the lawyer known as the standard conception? Questions like this divided legal ethicists into two groups: the critics of the standard conception and its defenders. This paper provides an insight into the decades-long debate between them, drawing on the relevant Anglo-Saxon legal literature. Part I clarifies the term "lawyer's role" as used in theoretical legal ethics; Part II introduces the key concepts of the field and the methodological approach characteristic of the first wave; Part III provides the historical background to the emergence of the legal ethics scholarship; Parts IV and V give an overview of the main arguments developed by the leading critics and defenders of the standard conception; finally, Part VI summarizes the results of the first wave of theoretical legal ethics and refers to the shift in perspective in the early 2000s that led to the second wave.