Title: Conceptions of Lawyers' Agency in Legal Ethics Scholarship
Abstract: I have recently commented elsewhere in pages of this journal on one of many pressing problems I see facing legal profession in twenty-first century. I will focus here on what I think is one of most urgent problems faced by those who study pressing problems of legal profession-i.e., legal ethics professors and scholars. That problem is how to conceive of lawyers' individual and collective in working to reform profession and society more generally. By this I mean: how should we evaluate lawyers' ability to bring about meaningful change in enormously complex, resistant, and ambiguous set of institutions we lump together when we refer to the legal profession?The problem of how to conceive of individual and collective agency is, of course, a problem that pervades legal scholarship. On one hand, idea that people at a fundamental level choose how they conduct their lives is enormously appealing, having roots deep in classical philosophical liberalism and related Anglo-American jurisprudential justifications for holding individuals morally accountable for their acts.2 On other hand, strong conceptions of unconstrained agency defy our observations of way in which social position affects life trajectory. Not only do we observe this phenomenon reflected in our personal social worlds, but a large sociological and historical literature amply documents constraints imposed on individuals' opportunities in law as a result of structural barriers including race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity. This literature further establishes that some of these barriers persist through nearly invisible but no less pernicious mechanisms, despite efforts to eradicate them.
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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