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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Legal profession > Legal ethics & professional conduct
The issue of underperformance at partner level remains incredibly
agonising and sensitive in law firms. Low demand for legal services
has been compounded by an increase in the competitive forces both
inside and outside the legal profession. Life has become even more
difficult for partners, for whom performance demands have increased
at the same time as the availability of work has tailed off.
Underperformance continues to affect law firms in many ways, not
least of which are diminished profitability, loss of opportunity,
the disaffection of high performers, challenges to the firm's
values and falling morale. What is more, underperformance has to be
seen not just in terms of productivity but also in terms of a more
holistic approach to a firm's standards. Drawing on original and
academic research from the past 8 years, and featuring
contributions from law firm performance experts including Edwin
Reeser, Angus Lyon, and Patrick McKenna, author Nick Jarrett-Kerr's
highly anticipated Tackling Partner Underperformance 2nd Edition
covers topics including: *Trends in partner performance
*Understanding why partners underperform or are underproductive
*Judging, rating and evaluating partners *Aligning performance with
partner compensation and rewards *Supporting and rehabilitating
underperforming partners *Stress and mental illness impact on
performance *Systems for partner performance management
*Underperformance culture *Governance, communication and conflict
management *And more. Tackling Partner Underperformance 2nd Edition
is arguably the most comprehensive study ever undertaken into
partner underperformance in law firms, and those firms (regardless
of size and location) who utilize and implement the information,
advice and practical strategies for addressing this issue, will see
significant differences in their productivity and ultimately
profitability.
This book explains the historical significance and introduction of
the presumption of innocence into common law legal systems. It
explains that the presumption should be seen as reflecting notions
of moral comfort around judgment of others. Specifically, when one
is asked to make a judgment about the guilt or otherwise of a
person accused of wrongdoing, the default position should be to do
nothing. This reflects the very serious consequences of what we do
when we decide someone is guilty of wrongdoing and is not a step to
be taken lightly. Traditionally, decision makers have only taken it
when they are morally comfortable with that decision. It then
documents how legislators in a range of common law jurisdictions
have undermined the presumption of innocence, through measures such
as reverse onus provisions, allowing or requiring inferences to be
made against an accused, redefining offenses and defenses in novel
ways to minimize the burden on the prosecutor, and by dressing
proceedings as civil when they are in substance criminal. Courts
have too easily acceded to such measures, in the process permitting
accused persons to be convicted although there is reasonable doubt
as to their guilt, and where they are not guilty of sufficiently
blameworthy conduct to attract criminal sanction. It finds that the
courts must be prepared to re-assert the prime importance of the
presumption of innocence, only permitting criminal sanctions to be
imposed where they are morally certain that the accused did that of
which they have been accused, and morally comfortable that the
conduct being addressed is worthy of the kind of criminal sanction
which prosecutors seek to impose. Courts must be morally
comfortable about the finding of guilt, and the imposition of the
criminal penalty in a given case. They have lost sight of this
moral underpinning to criminal law process and substance, and it
must be regained.
This book discusses how judges qualify their activities as
objective. The data for this project was retrieved from a large
sample of cases using Langacker's methodology. The sample included
over a thousand decisions from Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Romania and the UK. The decisions
considered allegations of judicial bias, unfairness, and injustice.
Pre-judices are shared cognitive methods that legal practitioners
perceive as necessary. The results of the study directly confirm
Pierre Legrand's claims of pre-judices in legal discourse, and as
corollary, Jules L. Coleman and Brian Leiter's idea of modest
objectivity in law.
Conscience has long been a foundational theme in Christian ethics,
but it is a notoriously slippery and contested term. This volume
works to define conscience and reveal the similarities and
differences between different Christian traditions' thinking on the
subject. In a thorough and scholarly manner, the authors explore
Christian theological, legal, constitutional, historical, and
philosophical meanings of conscience. Covering a range of
historical periods, major figures in the development of conscience,
and contemporary applications, this book is a vital source for
scholars from a wide variety of disciplines seeking to understand
conscience from a range of perspectives.
No sitting federal judge has ever written so trenchant a critique
of the federal judiciary as Richard A. Posner does in this, his
most confrontational book. Skewering the politicization of the
Supreme Court, the mismanagement of judicial staff, the overly
complex system of appeals, the threat of originalism, outdated
procedures, and the backward-looking traditions of law schools and
the American judicial system, Posner has written a cri de coeur and
a battle cry. With the prospect that the Supreme Court will soon be
remade in substantial, potentially revanchist, ways, The Federal
Judiciary exposes the American legal system's most troubling
failures in order to instigate much-needed reforms. Posner presents
excerpts from legal texts and arguments to expose their flaws,
incorporating his own explanation and judgment to educate readers
in the mechanics of judicial thinking. This rigorous intellectual
work separates sound logic from artful rhetoric designed to subvert
precedent and open the door to oblique interpretations of American
constitutional law. In a rebuke of Justice Antonin Scalia's legacy,
Posner shows how originalists have used these rhetorical strategies
to advance a self-serving political agenda. Judicial culture
adheres to an antiquated traditionalism, Posner argues, that
inhibits progressive responses to threats from new technologies and
other unforeseen challenges to society. With practical
prescriptions for overhauling judicial practices and precedents,
The Federal Judiciary offers an unequaled resource for
understanding the institution designed by the founders to check
congressional and presidential power and resist its abuse.
Confidentiality and record keeping are essential aspects of
everyday counselling practice. This book introduces you to the law,
ethics, guidance and policy relevant to counselling records and
confidentiality, using examples from practice to apply this to a
wide range of counselling situations and dilemmas. This edition is
fully updated to cover recent developments in guidance,
professional ethics, policy and law, including new chapters on GDPR
and data protection law and online and telephone counselling
practice. With an extensive glossary, checklists and useful legal
and other resources, this is an essential resource for trainees and
practitioners in the helping professions.
Currently, the dominant enforcement paradigm is based on the idea
that states deal with 'bad people' - or those pursuing their own
self-interests - with laws that exact a price for misbehavior
through sanctions and punishment. At the same time, by contrast,
behavioral ethics posits that 'good people' are guided by cognitive
processes and biases that enable them to bend the laws within the
confines of their conscience. In this illuminating book, Yuval
Feldman analyzes these paradigms and provides a broad theoretical
and empirical comparison of traditional and non-traditional
enforcement mechanisms to advance our understanding of how states
can better deal with misdeeds committed by normative citizens
blinded by cognitive biases regarding their own ethicality. By
bridging the gap between new findings of behavioral ethics and
traditional methods used to modify behavior, Feldman proposes a
'law of good people' that should be read by scholars and
policymakers around the world.
The justification and commensurability of punishments is a central
problem of all state and social philosophies. This essay is
concerned with theories of retribution and theories of general
prevention of crime, and works out its own point of view in a
combination of the concept that the purpose of punishment is to
deter the offender and resocialization, and derives from this a
plea for a system for dealing with criminals which respects their
human dignity.
Selected Standards on Professional Responsibility discusses one of
the most rapidly changing fields in American law. Covering
national, as well as New York and California, standards on
professional responsibility, this volume collects the most
up-to-date and important standards that govern judicial and legal
ethics, including: ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct The
American Lawyer's Code of Conduct California Rules of Professional
Conduct New York Code of Professional Responsibility ABA
Aspirational Goals for Lawyer Advertising ABA Canons of
Professional Ethics Students, faculty, the practicing bar, and
judges will find this book to be an essential examination of
professional responsibility issues they confront daily.
This book is an assault on the notion that it is empirically
accurate and legally and philosophically satisfactory to see humans
as atomistic entities. It contends that our welfare is inextricably
entangled with that of others, and accordingly law and ethics, in
determining our best interests, should recognise the central
importance of relationality, the performance of obligations, and
(even apparently injurious) altruism.
Parker and Evans's Inside Lawyers' Ethics provides a practical and
engaging introduction to ethical decision-making in legal practice
in Australia. Underpinned by four theoretical concepts –
adversarial advocacy, responsible lawyering, moral activism and
ethics of care – this text analyses legal and professional
frameworks, highlighting relevant parts of the Australian
Solicitors' Conduct Rules. Case studies and discussion questions
offer contemporary, practical examples of the application of
ethics. The book also addresses the challenge of ethical action and
offers techniques to deal with ethical conflicts.This edition has
been comprehensively updated and discusses the implications of
advances in legal technology, mental ill-health in the profession
and the complexities of government legal practice. A new chapter
covers lawyers' ethical obligation to address the legal challenges
posed by climate change. Written by an expert author team, Parker
and Evans's Inside Lawyers' Ethics empowers readers to identify
ethical challenges and resolve them through good decision-making
practices.
Wertheimer attempts to move beyond previous theories of coercion
by conducting a fairly extensive survey of the way in which cases
involving coercion have been treated by American courts. This
impressive project occupies the first half of the book, where he
makes a convincing case that there is a fairly unified 'theory of
coercion' at work in adjudication, past and present. This legal
theory, however, is not entirely adequate for the purposes of
social and political philosophy, and the last half of the book
develops Wertheimer's more comprehensive philosophical theory.
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
This book concludes a trilogy that began with studies on Dante
Alighieri s Sense of Justice (2011) and Adam Smith as Legal
Historian (2012) with a work about the French contribution to the
intellectual history of the law. It examines the development of the
basic principles of law during the Early Modern Era that the German
Science Council recently set as a target for legal education."
The study of legal ethics and the legal profession has emerged as a
distinct and important field of scholarship over the last 30 years.
However, as in other disciplines, academic recognition can in turn
entrench static and powerful meta-theories and narratives about
professional ethos and practise, this collection seeks to disrupt
this homogenising impulse and to present alternative voices by
bringing together a range of international scholars writing about
legal ethics and the legal profession. The book features
significant and timely contributions which take contemporary and
non-mainstream perspectives on the current and future shape of the
legal profession. The essays not only describe the rapidly changing
profession but canvas different approaches to scholarship on the
legal profession. The collection seeks to explore a diverse and
contextualised profession from a number of angles. Authors examine
how the public sees lawyers and how lawyers see their own
profession; how we practise law and how this practice shapes
lawyers; how such cultural and professional practice intersects
with institutional structures of the law to create certain legal
outcomes; and how we regulate the legal profession to modify or
institute ethical practice. The volume provides insights into legal
culture and ethics from the perspective of authors from Australia,
Canada, England, the United States, New Zealand and Kenya - a
diversity of national perspectives that give valuable insights into
developments in the profession at the local and global level. It
also illustrates diversity within the profession by tracing
differing professional career trajectories based on raced or
gendered barriers, alternative ethical strategies and the impact of
organisational cultures in which lawyers practice.
In this up-to-date new Edition, Wright and his team of expert
contributing authors incorporate results of the latest studies on
sex offender policies in their critical analyses of current laws,
and assess the most effective approaches in preventing sex offender
recidivism. This provocative book has been updated throughout to
reflect the latest research in the fields of criminal justice, law,
forensic psychology, and social work. It is the only book on the
market that offers such a focused and comprehensive examination of
current sex offender laws and policies and what is known about
their efficacy. This new and expanded Edition of the book presents
alternative models and approaches to sex offense laws and policies,
including a brand new chapter on Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner
programs. The authors explore critical, cutting-edge topics, such
as sexting, internet sexual solicitation, the death penalty, and
community responses to sex offense.
The collection of rulings publishes the administration of justice
by governmental courts in the Federal Republic of Germany
pertaining to the relationship of church and state, and also
regarding further problems which are characterized by the relevance
of religious concerns.
Daniel Sperling discusses the legal status of posthumous interests
and their possible defeat by actions performed following the death
of a person. The author first explores the following questions: Do
the dead have interests and/or rights, the defeat of which may
constitute harm? What does posthumous harm consist of and when does
it occur, if at all? This is followed by a more detailed analysis
of three categories of posthumous interests arising in the
medico-legal context: the proprietary interest in the body of the
deceased, the testamentary interest in determining the disposal of
one's body after death and the interest in post-mortem medical
confidentiality. Sperling concludes that if we acknowledge the
interest in one's symbolic existence and legally protect it, not
only do some interests survive a person's death but we should also
enjoy a peremptory legal power to shape in advance our symbolic
existence after death.
Adam Smith was not just a pioneer of political economy; he was also
a moral philosopher who aspired to write a systematic theory of
law. Though he never completed the project - he asked the executors
of his estate to burn his notes - his major published works contain
a multitude of passages from which significant portions of his
legal theory can be reconstructed. Many of Smith's views are of
great relevance to present-day issues. He proposed financial
regulation restricting the freedom of individuals, which he likened
to the necessity of equipping buildings with firewalls. In light of
the global firestorm caused by the most recent banking crisis,
Smith's ideas appear strikingly modern.
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