Jethro K. Lieberman

W. W. Norton, 1978, 247pp.

Lawyers were the preeminent players in the moral and political drama that was Watergate. In its wake, stung by damning criticism, courts and bar associations demanded reforms in law schools and elsewhere to insure that lawyers would abide by their professional obligations. The trouble was, though, that the code of ethics itself was rotten, if not to the core then certainly deep below many parts of its capacious surface. This book examines the state of legal ethics in the late 1970s and argues the need for considerable change. (A note to the eagle-eyed: The subtitle shown above is correct, even though it does not correspond to the subtitle you see to the left on the picture of the jacket. The publisher goofed! The correct subtitle appears on the book's title page.)

Listed by The New York Times Book Review on both its summer reading and Christmas book lists, 1978.

 

 

"According to lawyer-author Jethro Lieberman, 'Probably no profession on earth, not excluding the ministry, has today as full and public a code of ethics as the lawyers.' Code of ethics! As you read this book, a masterful vivisection of that code . . . you are repeatedly astonished that the word 'ethics' should be associated with it. . . . Jethro Lieberman is peculiarly qualified to present this felicitously written indictment."

"Every lawyer should read this book; it would prove helpful to general readers too. . . . Lieberman takes the cudgels to the legal profession and leaves it rather bloody."

"A timely and provocative examination of the Bar's regulation of lawyers' conduct and of what lawyers see as the ethical duties and dilemmas they face . . . Lieberman by and large rises above the shrill moralism and anecdotal muckraking of some recent popular works on lawyers. He presents a thoughtful highly critical analysis of the code of professional responsibility. . . . The chapters on law clinics and lawyers' advertising provide the best treatment of these subjects I have read to date."