Professional Responsibility

Notes: 1st Class

GETTING STARTED-I
or
How I Got To Be an Ethics Teacher?

GETTING STARTED-II

GETTING STARTED-III

How do we know when a lawyer is being "professionally responsible"? The question, at least for me, turns out to be harder than I would think it would be. Perhaps we need, to reformulate the question: What are the sources and the basis for a lawyer's "professional responsibility"?

A DICTIONARY DEFINITION: RESPONSIBILITY

Responsibility (with some help from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary)

Responsibility: "The quality or state of being responsible: as ... moral, legal, or mental accountability; reliability, trustworthiness; something for which one is responsible: Burden."

Responsible: "liable to be called upon to answer as the primary cause, motive, or agent; liable to legal review or in case of fault to penalties; able to answer for one's conduct and obligations; Trustworthy; being a free moral agent; involving responsibility or accountability; politically answerable

Syn.: Responsible, Answerable, Accountable, Amenable, Liable mean subject to an authority that may punish default, Responsible implies holding a formal organization role, duty, or trust; Answerable suggests a relation between one having a moral or legal obligation and a court or other authority charged with oversight of its observance; Accountable suggests imminence of retribution for unfulfilled trust or violated obligation; Amenable and Liable stress the fact of subjection to review, censure, or control by a designated authority under certain conditions."

Response: [middle French & Latin, to promise in return, answer] to say something in return: make an answer; to react in response; to be answerable

Respondent: one who responds, as one who maintains a thesis in reply; one who answers in various legal proceedings (as in equity cases); the prevailing party in the lower court (in contrast with the appellant).

    LEGAL ETHICS LAWYER ETHICS

Why I don't use the term legal ethics

And use instead "lawyer ethics"

Legal ethics (and professional responsibility) as these names have been used to describe a course of law school study put the emphasis on rules (and law), on a body of ethical rules (Rules for Professional Conduct).

legal ethics     law ethics     law morality     law justice

ethics morality

procedure substance

procedure outcomes

ordinary morality professional morality

head heart

reason feeling

ETHICS MORALS
A PROBLEM: OF WHAT KIND?

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COURSE (MAYBE)

Some thoughts about how the study of "lawyer ethics" might be different
than the study of the law courses you took in your first semester. . .

ADVERSARIALISM / ZEALOUS ADVOCACY

We begin by trying to get a better sense of how an adversary system of justice and the adversarial ethos and culture it produces (in its current configuration) has a serious moral undertow.