Freedman (law, Hofstra Law School and Georgetown Law) and Smith (director of the criminal defense and prisoner advocacy clinic, co-director of the E. Barret Prettyman Fellowship Program, Georgetown Law) have co-authored a text (now in its fourth edition) that adopts a theoretical approach to understanding the role of lawyers' ethics in the American legal system.
Rather than serving as a review guide for individual states' ethical rules, this text instead focuses on the foundational basis for the development of ethical rules in American jurisprudence and analyzes the structure of the American Bar Association's model rules of ethics. This theoretical approach provides students and practitioners the opportunity to develop an understanding of the fundamental principles underpinning the ethical rules that govern legal practice throughout the 50 states. In addition, real-life examples help readers understand how the theoretical principles discussed throughout the text arise in actual legal practice.
Each of the 12 chapters are broken down into subsections and cover subjects as broad as the adversary system and as specific as prosecutors' ethics. The neat organization makes navigating the chapters straightforward and gives readers the opportunity to become accustomed to the formatting of professional legal writing.
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