The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer

As a starting place for a broad-reaching contemplation of the moral challenges that face a much-maligned profession, Zitrin and Langford's book is as good as any. The authors ask whether it is possible for a lawyer to remain a decent human being while practicing law in the current system. Their conclusion is less than sanguine. Each chapter addresses a different type of ethical dilemma that lawyers regularly face in their practice. The earlier chapters deal with the types of scenarios that underlie the general public's distrust of lawyers: criminal trial attorneys who protect or become complicit with defendants; corporate attorneys who do the same for their wealthy clients. The book then moves on to more ""lawyerly"" concerns, such as the difficulties of representing a ""class"" in a class action and the use of attorney/client privilege by in-house corporate counsel. The authors, both practitioners and teachers, conclude with a chapter on their view of the changes necessary to protect the ethical future of the legal profession. General readers will likely savor the real-life accounts of unethical and sometimes criminally liable attorneys, while attorneys themselves may have little incentive to finish a book that implies that common human decency and morality are most often left at the door in the practice of law. If there's a fundamental flaw to the book, it's the emphasis on extreme examples of bad behavior rather than on the moral tightropes that even the most ethical lawyers walk every day. Major ad/ promo. (May)