Lawyers in Practice

Ethical Decision Making in Context

Levin Leslie C., Mather Lynn

How do lawyers resolve ethical dilemmas in the everyday context of their practice? What are the issues that commonly arise, and how do lawyers determine the best ways to resolve them? Until recently, efforts to answer these questions have focused primarily on rules and legal doctrine rather than the real-life situations lawyers face in legal practice.

The first book to present empirical research on ethical decision making in a variety of practice contexts, including corporate litigation, securities, immigration, and divorce law, "Lawyers in Practice" fills a substantial gap in the existing literature. Following an introduction emphasizing the increasing importance of understanding context in the legal profession, contributions focus on ethical dilemmas ranging from relatively narrow ethical issues to broader problems of professionalism, including the prosecutor's obligation to disclose evidence, the management of conflicts of interest, and loyalty to clients and the court. Each chapter details the resolution of a dilemma from the practitioner's point of view that is, in turn, set within a particular community of practice. Timely and practical, this book should be required reading for law students as well as students and scholars of law and society.

Reviews

"With 'Lawyers in Practice', Leslie C. Levin and Lynn Mather break new ground. This is the first book to locate the ethical and unethical behavior of lawyers in details of their many varied practice contexts; the contributors make a convincing case that we can only understand lawyers' behavior contextually. Very thorough, illuminating, and persuasive" – Richard Abel, UCLA School of Law

"This outstanding collection of essays on the actualities of legal practice in a variety of contexts is an important complement – and in many ways a corrective – to the perception of the bar as sufficiently undifferentiated to make a single 'Code of Responsibility' a truly sensible enterprise. I think this will be of great interest to any scholar in the field precisely because it fleshes out, with vivid concrete examples and interviews, the implications of the fact that the bar is highly fragmented" – Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School

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