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Title: The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer : Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed by Carol M. Langford, Richard A. Zitrin ISBN: 0-449-00671-9 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 05 September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.7 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Catalog of all the Ethical Problems; Short on Solutions
Comment: Zitrin and Langford challenge those in the legal profession to aspire towards a higher standard than the billable hour. They do well at illustrating the ethical conflicts lawyers face daily with examples from cases that stretch the limits of honest representation. In the end, however, attorneys looking for ethical guidance or for ways out of the ethical dilemmas and conflicts Zitrin and Langford present, will be a little disappointed as the authors only catalog the extremes and the abuses without ever offering solutions; these extremes and abuses are the same cases and examples lawyers were presented with in law school and agonized over in ethics courses. A young member of the profession looking for some guidance from these experienced attorneys will unfortunately find no guidance forthcoming, so in this respect, Zitgrin and Langford do no more than cast stones. Yet the book is extremely valuable as it forces the attorney to return to those law school hypotheticals and ethics dilemmas and wrestle with them once again, this time from the perspective of one who has experienced the pressures to pad the timesheet, to withhold the discovery request, and to justify what most folks would call "lies" as zealous representation. Zitrin and Langford also illustrate that there is often a huge gap between what is ethical and what is moral, and for these reasons, this book should be taught in the law schools along with the Model Rules and the case books.
Rating: 5
Summary: A must-read. Better, and more engrossing, than fiction!
Comment: We've all heard the lawyer jokes. We all suspect that "guilty" or "not guilty" is determined largely by how much you're willing to pay for representation. We think there's only a tenuous relationship, at best, bewteen "truth" and "justice". And we believe slimeball lawyers - the ones who ignore professional ethics and responsibility - are the root problem of a deteriorating US legal system. What this book does, and does well, is illuminate problems of legal ethics and morality, and in a highly engaging style. The authors present numerous real-life accounts - many nearly unbelievable - of the actual behavior of some lawyers. And they put them in the context of our flawed legal system. But they also show how it can be improved. Provocative and highly recommended.
Rating: 3
Summary: More questions than answers
Comment: I am afraid that I don't share other reviewers' enthusiasm for this book. Others have noted that it is rather short on solutions to the problems that it outlines. However, it seems to me that this book doesn't know which audience it is aimed at.
My instincts tell me that it is aimed at the general public - not least because of the breezy, senasationalist tone it adopts. There's an awful lot of scaremongering of the "Gee - isn't it awful what these lawyers are doing?" variety. Indeed, I don't take issue with the factual accuracy of the behaviors instanced by the authors. However, my gripe is that the authors do not put these acts in proportion - the lay reader will come away from this book without any idea at all as to how common are these practices that the authors catalog.
The reputation of the legal profession in the United States is at a pretty low ebb. This book will do nothing to improve public perceptions of it. I do not claim that all is well and the public has nothing to worry about - however, the public does deserve to know just how widespread are the practices that the authors describe. The subtitle for this book might just as well be "lawyers are bad for your wealth" yet the public cannot do without legal services. We can expect those who read this book to view their visit to a lawyer's office with as much enthusiasm as a visit to a dentist or a proctologist. Frankly I think the public deserve to be better informed than this on the issues raised by this book.
Lawyers will find little surprising here - other than the impression that the temple of the law is falling about heads and we know nothing, or care nothing, about it. Zitrin and Langford produced a useful casebook on legal ethics - although not as good as Professor Rhode's - but their legal scholarship has taken second place to legal journalism with this book. The book is short but its scope is all encompassing. The inevitable result is a superficial treatment of important issues and a general lack of reflective insight.
If lay or professional readers want to know just how thought provoking and readable a good reflection on the "state of the profession" can be, I urge them to read Michael H Trotters's "Profit and the Practice of Law: What's happened to the legal profession?" and compare that with Part Two of this book.
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Title: Introduction to the Study of Law: Cases and Materials by John Makdisi ISBN: 1583607560 Publisher: Anderson Pub Co Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society by Mary Ann Glendon ISBN: 0674601386 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Lost Lawyer : Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession by Anthony T. Kronman ISBN: 0674539273 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1995 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year At Harvard Law School by Scott Turow ISBN: 0446673781 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century by Sol M. Linowitz, Martin Mayer ISBN: 0684194163 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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