Ethics

In an interesting blog post, Robert Wechsler analyzes how the legal ethics rules were applied in the matter of the government lawyer involved in the Kwame Kilpatrick affair.  Wechsler writes: 

A government official's obligations are far stronger than a lawyer's. Therefore, a government lawyer's obligations must be first those of a government official, and only secondarily those of a lawyer. Otherwise, any lawyer who is a government official will have a very different, and weaker, set of obligations than all other government officials.



Even more serious, this hearing panel decision takes a legalistic approach to ethics, making every effort to interpret the rules to the benefit of the lawyer and considering the rules of conduct the maximum expected of a lawyer. This differentiates legal ethics from government ethics, where the rules are considered the minimum expected of government officials. This is the same approach that was taken in my legal ethics course back in law school. The lectures concerned more what lawyers can do to get around the rules of conduct than what lawyers should not be doing. Applying legal cleverness to ethics rules is inappropriate and damaging to their validity as well as to their goals.