This unique collection of ten significant ethics rulings reveal the rich background surrounding salient cases on issues of race, gender, class, taxation, bankruptcy, defense representation, confidentiality, practicing with law partners, and greed. The story behind each case provides a look into its immediate impact as well as its continuing importance in shaping the law. This book serves as a reminder that ultimately law is about human beings, not ?doctrines? or even ?cases,? because the human lives it addresses are real and vivid. The stories typify issues that most lawyers confront in one form or other at some time in their careers. In a striking way, the stories bring a human dimension to the pressures lawyers face, the ethical decisions they confront, the institutions they work in, and the daily choices they make.

A wide-ranging collection of essays from a leading scholar of legal ethics.

A 70-year-old woman bed-bound following a stroke has developed bronchopneumonia, but her daughter produces an advance directive that she says her mother has written, which states that no life-sustaining treatment is to be given. How are you going to proceed? A practical guide on how to approach the legal and ethical dilemmas that frequently occur in hospital wards and medicine in the community, 100 Cases in Clinical Ethics and Law explores typical dilemmas through the use of 100 common medical scenarios. The book covers issues such as consent, capacity, withdrawal of treatment and confidentiality, as well as less-frequently examined problems like student involvement in internal examinations, whistle-blowing and the role of medical indemnity providers in complaints. Each scenario has a practical problem-solving element to it and encourages readers to explore their own beliefs and values, including those that arise as a result of differing cultural and religious backgrounds. Answer pages highlight key points in each case and provide advice on how to deal with the emotive issues that occur when practising medicine, at the same time providing information and guidance on appropriate behaviour.

Jonathan Herring provides a clear and engaging overview of legal ethics, highlighting the ethical issues surrounding professional conduct and raising interesting questions about how lawyers act and what their role entails. Key topics, such as confidentiality and fees, are covered with references throughout to the professional codes of conduct.

In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of law—law simply because so ordered—as something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful. To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.

Combining theory with real-world examples, this book explores the classic problems of legal ethics and the philosophy of law.