Law Practice,
Ethics/Professional Responsibility
Mar. 27, 2019
Inequality, polarization are undermining ethical lawyering
The opportunity for lawyers to mediate conflicting viewpoints and interests toward some broader vision of the public interest is fading in a world of widening economic inequality and political division.
Scott Cummings
Professor
UCLA School of Law
Phone: (310) 295-2195
Scott is Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at UCLA, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, public interest law, law and social movements, and community economic development. He is the faculty director of Legal Ethics and the Profession (LEAP), a program promoting research and programming on the challenges facing the contemporary legal profession.
We live in uncivil times. What should we expect of our nation's lawyers? There are two American traditions with long and complex histories. One is of the lawyer who transcends partisanship; the other is of the lawyer who embraces it. The former is embodied in figures like former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who as a private lawyer famously espoused the model of lawyering "for the situation" -- transcending the specific preferences of clients to broker solutio...
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