As I have sought to emphasize, if lawyers want to receive more professional respect for their work, they will have to earn it by reframing their ethical duties and taking them more seriously. This will not be done, as the neo-traditionalists seem to recommend, by offering better explanations and novel justifications for existing practices. Instead, it will require a genuine willingness to change what lawyers do and, as important, how lawyers think about what they do. A preparatory step to this essential task is to scrutinize more thoroughly the structure and failings of the Standard Conception of legal ethics and professional responsibility.

CLEARING THE GROUND

A revised theory of legal ethics will need to reclaim and rethink the nature of this public-spiritedness that is supposed to animate professional practice if lawyers are to retain the privileges and independence they presently claim. The argument that there is a strongly differentiated role morality that lawyers are to interpose between their personal and their professional lives can only be justified if it serves the public interest more than it does their own self-interest. In short, it is incumbent on the profession to ensure that the interests of justice are placed squarely and regularly at the forefront of professional concerns. As such, the primary justificatory challenge is to interrogate the dominant model of the ethical lawyer that informs the practicing lives of lawyers. In particular, it will be necessary to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary and fuller set of discursive resources that will be up to the task of negotiating better the difficult ethical terrain of professional lawyering: On whose behalf should legal services be deployed? And how should lawyers operate in the service of those clients and causes?

However, as a preliminary matter, it is necessary to clear away some of the conceptual debris that presently hinders efforts to move forward. First, the place to begin any reconstructive project is with the Standard Conception of ethical lawyering and its institutional privileging of client partisanship, substantive neutrality and professional non-accountability.