American Legal Ethics

Abstract

The ethics of American lawyers come from the English gentleman-lawyer of the nineteenth century, with the steady addition of an elitist Jeffersonian gloss. But they have, within the last century, been separated, so that regulation claims to operate without conscience. The result is that the law of lawyers is now the principal, if not only, feature of the official codes, and ethics as ethics is spread over insignificant consensus statements by bar associations and promising scholarship from academic lawyers, some small part of which deserves to be called ethics and even, from small beginnings, to be called religious ethics.