Search

Becoming a lawyer is about much more than acquiring knowledge and technique. As law students learn the law and acquire some basic skills, they are also inevitably forming a deep sense of themselves in their new roles as lawyers. That sense of self – the student's nascent professional identity – needs to take a particular form if the students are to fulfil the public purposes of lawyers and find deep meaning and satisfaction in their work. In this book, Professors Patrick Longan, Daisy Floyd, and Timothy Floyd combine what they have learned in many years of teaching and research concerning the lawyer's professional identity with lessons derived from legal ethics, moral psychology, and moral philosophy. They describe in depth the six virtues that every lawyer needs as part of his or her professional identity, and they explore both the obstacles to acquiring and deploying those virtues and strategies for overcoming those impediments. The result is a straightforward guide for law students on how to cultivate a professional identity that will allow them to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others and to flourish as individuals.

Every lawyer wants to be a good lawyer. They want to do right by their clients, contribute to the professional community, become good colleagues, interact effectively with people of all persuasions, and choose the right cases. All of these skills and behaviors are important, but they spring from hard-to-identify foundational qualities necessary for good lawyering. After focusing for three years on getting high grades and sharpening analytical skills, far too many lawyers leave law school without a real sense of what it takes to be a good lawyer. In The Good Lawyer, Douglas O. Linder and Nancy Levit combine evidence from the latest social science research with numerous engaging accounts of top-notch attorneys at work to explain just what makes a good lawyer. They outline and analyze several crucial qualities: courage, empathy, integrity, diligence, realism, a strong sense of justice, clarity of purpose, and an ability to transcend emotionalism. Many qualities require apportionment in the right measure, and achieving the right balance is difficult. Lawyers need to know when to empathize and also when to detach; courage without an appreciation of consequences becomes recklessness; working too hard leads to exhaustion and mistakes. And what do you do in tricky situations, where the urge to deceive is high? How can you maintain focus through a mind-taxing (or mind-numbing) project? Every lawyer faces these problems at some point, but if properly recognized and approached, they can be overcome. It's not easy being good, but this engaging guide will serve as a handbook for any lawyer trying not only to figure out how to become a better--and, almost always, more fulfilled--lawyer.

An entertaining diversion for Lawyers and others, Twenty Famous Lawyers focuses on household names and high profile cases. Contains valuable insights into legal ways and means and looks at the challenges of advocacy, persuasion and the finest traditions of the Law. With a backdrop of famous cases and personalities, Twenty Famous Lawyers is a kaleidoscope of information about the world of Lawyers. To the fore are 20 individuals selected by John Hostettler as representative of those who have left their mark on legal developments. Ranging across countries, cultures and time these are people who helped raise (or in some cases lower) the Law's values and standards. From high politics to human rights to legal loopholes, manipulation, pitfalls and downright trickery, the book is also a celebration of the contribution made by Lawyers to society and democracy — often by those pushing boundaries or challenging injustice or convention. The book's ‘supporting cast'includes such diverse personalities as Julius Caesar, Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Prince Regent and Lily Langtry. It covers trials for treason, murder, terrorism and even regicide, visiting courts from the Old Bailey to the Supreme Court of the USA to those of Ancient Rome. With chapters on: Clarence Darrow, Edward Carson, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, Matthew Hale, Marcus Cicero, Henry Brougham, John Adams, Helena Kennedy, Norman Birkett, Jeremy Bentham, Geoffrey Robertson, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Coke, Thomas Jefferson, Shami Chakrabati, James Fitzjames Stephen, Edward Marshall Hall, Gareth Peirce, Lord Denning and Cesare Beccaria.

Juristen sind in vielerlei Funktionen tätig: als Richter, Rechtsanwälte, Beamte, Professoren, in Beratungs- und Leitungsaufgaben. Gibt es etwas, das sie in diesen unterschiedlichen Funktionen verbindet, das ihre Haltung und Tätigkeit prägt und es erlaubt, von einem Beruf der Juristen zu sprechen? Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde sieht dies Verbindende in einem gemeinsamen Ethos der Juristen. Worin besteht dieses Ethos? Er geht den verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen dieses Ethos nach - bei den römischen Juristen, den kontinentaleuropäischen Juristen der Neuzeit und den am anglo-amerikanischen Case-law orientierten Juristen - und fragt nach dem Grundgehalt dieses Ethos, nach dem, was den Juristen zum Juristen im Unterschied zu einem versierten Rechtstechniker macht. Das wird an drei kennzeichnenden Beispielen näher erläutert. Abschließend fragt er nach dem anthropologischen Wurzelgrund, der ein solches Ethos hervorbringt und trägt.