This book by Daniel Markovits is a couple of years old, but Princeton University Press has recently brought it out on paperback and used this as an excuse to send me an e-mail about it. It looks like somebody working on this blog ought to read it soon. Here’s PUP’s blurb:
A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally.
Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients’ claims. Next, the book asks what it is like–not psychologically but ethically–to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to cheat on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers’ lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally, A Modern Legal Ethics reintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers’ central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy.
The PUP webpage for the book lets you download the first chapter and a podcast with the author (who is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale University).
Ethics for Adversaries 