• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship
    • Faculty Scholarship Series
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Three Issues in Legal Ethics

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    2.pdf
    Size:
    68.92Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Markovits, Daniel
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/3300
    Abstract
    A court – which is the name given the institution charged with resolving legal disputes at retail – is comprised of three elements: an umpire ( judge or jury), disputants, and advocates. The court’s structural purpose is legitimate (which is not the same thing as just) dispute resolution. No part of the court can stand in for the whole; each is only a part. In order for the court to achieve legitimacy, each of its components must pursue partial aims: the umpire must seek truth and justice, the parties must be free to seek advantage, and lawyers must pursue partisan loyalty. Lawyerly partisanship thus stands against truth and justice – the court’s legitimacy requires this. Although rules of legal ethics might constrain hyper-zeal, the legitimacy of the court requires that lawyers’ ethics avoid imposing general duties to truth and justice as this would conflate advocate and umpire. This requirement of legitimation is a direct consequence of the familiar fact of moral pluralism. There simply exist no regulative principles – including principles of justice – on which all sides of moral and political disputes can agree. Legitimacy depends on affective engagement with a process; it cannot be sustained by argument. Adjudication is part of this process; and adjudication requires partisan lawyers. Partisanship is thus ineliminable from the lawyer’s life. Legal ethics must take such partisanship into account. To do so, it must take up problems associated with the lawyer’s integrity. Such questions are not mere navel-gazing but are instead entirely appropriate for a profession whose place in the political division of labour renders conflicts between professional obligations and ordinary moral ambitions particularly clear and stark. Legal ethics thus cannot – for reasons that apply to ethics quite generally – ever be reduced to generic moral or political theory. And in this sense, taking the lawyer’s point of view in legal ethics is not a sop to local interest but an inevitable part of any serious engagement with the legal facts and moral circumstances of the lawyer’s life.
    Collections
    Faculty Scholarship Series

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2025)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.