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ETHICAL IMAGES OF LAWYERS

This research paper outlines and discusses the ethical images of lawyers, as they are portrayed in fiction and in non-fiction, including legal writings. For centuries in Western literature-in novels, short stories and plays, lawyers have been cast in a negative light, as corrupt, untrustworthy and shifty, which reflected popular perceptions of the workings of the law. American literature through the Depression continued and elaborated upon this theme. Then, for a relatively brief period in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, lawyers were seen in fiction in a more positive light, a period which corresponded with the growth of a widespread and more equitably shared prosperity in the United States and a rethinking by many lawyers of their role in society. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new moral image of the lawyer in America emerged, an amoral, anti-hero, who reflected the concerns of the public concerning the lawyer's role in an increasingly divided, insecure and cynical society.

The Traditional Depiction of the Lawyer

In the 16th century, Sir Thomas More said that "lawyers were [the] sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters." William Shakespeare's line in his play, Henry IV, scene 2, that: "the first thing to do, we kill all the lawyers" was always good for a laugh in the stalls. For the common people in those days, lawyers were the embodiment of an oppressive legal system. They were the agents of property owners, the landlord who evicted his tenant farmers, the creditors who seized the last possessions of Madame Bovary in payment of her debts in Gustave Flaubert's novel by that name and the state which sent minor offenders like Jean Valjean in Victor Hugos' Les Miserables to debtors' prisons or imposed draconian criminal punishments for even minor infractions. In Charles Dickens' novel, the Pickwick Papers, one of his characters said that the "law is an ass." In Bleak House, he chronicled the dreary and endless delays of ...

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ETHICAL IMAGES OF LAWYERS. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:21, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692441.html