Document Type
Book Review
Publication Title
Michigan Law Review
Publication Date
2010
Abstract
The title of Daniel Markovits's book, A Modern Legal Ethics, gives the impression that it is a comprehensive treatise on contemporary lawyers' ethics. The contents of the book, however, are both more limited and more expansive than the title suggests. Markovits's treatment of lawyers' ethics concerns itself with what he conceives to be the pervasive guilty conscience of practicing lawyers over their "professional viciousness", and how lawyers can achieve a guilt-free professional identity "worthy of ... commitment." Markovits's goal in the book is to "articulate a powerful and distinctively lawyerly virtue," one that will provide "ethical vindication of [lawyers'] professional lives." Markovits believes that, in so doing, he will also offer "insights beyond legal ethics, concerning the generally fractured state of modern moral life."
Notwithstanding the efforts of a serious young scholar, Markovits's book falls short. Our focus in this review will be on his discussion of the ethics of adversary advocacy, which is the subtitle and predominant part of the book.
Recommended Citation
Monroe H. Freedman and Abbe Smith,
Misunderstanding Lawyers' Ethics, 108 Mich. L. Rev. 925
(2010)
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/faculty_scholarship/463
Comments
Review of A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Ethics in a Democratic Age.By Daniel Markovits. NewJersey: Princeton University Press. 2008