Ethics

Article by Michelle Gallant.  Abstract:

The tasking of Canadian lawyers with anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist finance obligations is a project fraught with uncertainty. It is not clear that the strategy of pursuing criminal finance, the underlying reason for the conscripting of lawyers into the war on criminal finance, works to deter crime. Whether there is space within Canadian legal norms to accommodate any conscription of lawyers is uncertain. And whether a new emergent model, regulation through professional governance, is an effective vehicle through which to deal with the conjunction of lawyers and criminal finance is uncertain. In charting the course of Canadian developments, this article demonstrates the problematic nature of the convergence of lawyers and anti-criminal finance regulation.

In a similar vein, I've previously posted on the idea of a new (and problematic) role that perhaps is emerging in the US: Officer of the Executive Branch.  Traditionally, lawyers were "Officers of the Court," and more recently, in the Model Rules, they are acknowledged as "Officers of the Legal System."  The idea is that lawyers have significant duties to the legal systems which grant lawyers the right to practice and which regulate that practice.  Our duties don't run only to clients; they also run to the system.  

If, increasingly, it is the federal government that permits lawyers to "do law" and that defines the outer limits of what we're permitted to do, then it's inevitable that some people will increasingly view lawyers as owing duties to the federal agencies.  The idea is problematic, and I have huge reservations about how it might be applied, but we've seen a lot more of that, and it will only increase.  One of the difficulties with the notion is that federal bureaucrats aren't necessarily steeped in the lawyerly virtues and hence may stress the agency's needs over the needs of clients.  The traditional role of "officer of the court" didn't raise the same danger, because most judges have a deep understanding of the practice of lawyering, and rule making in that sphere typically includes the participation of lawyers.