PRACTICE OF JUSTICE, THE

To what extent should a lawyer exploit loopholes in ways that enable clients to gain unintended advantages? 'The Practice of Justice' is a look at this and other traditional questions about the ethics of lawyering. William Simon charges that the profession's standard approach to these questions is incoherent and implausible. At the same time, he rejects the ethical approaches most frequently proposed by the profession's critics. The problem, he insists, does not lie in the profession's commitment to legal values over those of ordinary morality. Rather, Simon shows that the critical weakness of the standard approach is its reliance on a distinctive style of judgment - categorical, rule-bound, rigid - that is both ethically unattractive and rejected by most modern legal thought outside the realm of legal ethics. He develops an alternative approach based on a different, more contextual, style of judgment widely accepted in other areas of legal thought.