What is Neoethics?
Abstract: Neoethics [*} is a new word --- a fresh idiom --- for a necessary
modern approach to legal ethics. We use this new word to give emphasis to the
new world of legal and corporate ethics.
| This century has brought a changed complex
of social, cultural, and business conditions affecting the nature of the
legal ethics (1) an individual lawyer must follow and (2) the legal
community must embrace. |
We as lawyers are socially and politically adept. We know that social and
cultural changes have occurred since Enron, WorldCom and 911. But we lawyers do
not sufficiently understand the nature of the “legal ethics” which have followed
the social and cultural changes of the last half dozen years.
My dictionary gives me two main definitions of the word ethics:
Neoethics, the new world of legal and corporate ethics, exists because of the
merging of these two dictionary definitions. Moral philosophy and the standards
governing lawyers are merging, as they never have before. The public and
government now demand something from lawyers that courts and lawyers themselves
have not demanded. The public and government demand that the legal rules
governing lawyers’ conduct respond to the public perception of the moral choices
lawyers and corporate officers should make.
This is a “new ethics” requirement for private practice lawyers and corporate
counsel: to act in accordance with a contemporary public morality instead of a
lawyer-generated professional set of rules. The penalties for violating this
contemporary Neoethics requirement are both new and substantial. They affect
both individual lawyers and the entire legal system as a social institution.
Lawyers (and courts and law school professors) must examine and discuss the
neoethics — three things: a framework, a perception, and (only lastly) new
professional ethics rules:
1. A new combined legal/social ethical framework (“Neoethics framework)
in which lawyers must work.
2. A new way in which lawyers must perceive legal ethics (“neoethics
perception”) as a subject of study…
3. New legal professional ethics rules (“neoethics rules”) that respond
to this framework and perception.
[*] Neoethics Note: If you notice that this page is
like one at eDicta, it is because Bucklin is both the author of this page (and
holds the copyright), and Bucklin is also the ethics section editor of eDicta.
eDicta is authorized by Bucklin to use the content from various pages of this
site. eDicta is to be published as an Internet zine by the Tort Trial &
Insurance Practice Section of the American Bar Association
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