About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

12 Bus. Law. Update 1 (1991-1992)

handle is hein.journals/buslwme12 and id is 1 raw text is: ,__1W T j SA September/October Volume 12 Number 1991 1 Should Justice Matter? By the Honorable William T. Allen Chancellor, Delaware Court of Chancery Wilmington Editor's Note: This article is adapted from a speech presented to the Delaware Stale Bar Association on the occasion of Law Day 1991. W e lawyers are captives of a partic- ular vision of ourselves. Business lawyers, hardly less than litigators, by and large see their ideal professional selves, as single-minded defenders of their clients' interests or facilitators of their clients' transactions. This domi- nant view of what it means to be a law- yer tends to ex6lude as illegitimate a view of lawyers as independent actors responsible in some degree for the qual- ity of justice. I suggest, however, that this dominant conception of lawyers as only loyal agents is damaging to society and to the quality of lawyers' lives. It needs to be supplemented. In the dominant view of what it means to be a lawyer, each participant in our adversary system is seen as playing a specialized role that is defined wholly by legal and ethical rules. The role as- signed to private lawyers in this view is chiefly that of advisor and advocate charged with maximizing the interests of the client. These roles are seen as having no substantial place for action or restraint dictated by a lawyer's merely personal conceptions of justice or fair- ness. If an action is legally permissi- ble-and in practice, of course, that means some non-frivolous argument can be made that it is legally permissible- and if it is in the client's interest, the dominant view sees the zealous advo- cate as being required to take or facili- tate that action. It is not difficult to see why the view of lawyers as zealous advocates has come to dominate our conception of our- selves. First of all it flatters us. It recalls the lawyer-hero t to 'thoore', e coira- geous defender of the civil rights of un- popular persons in the face of a pressured, sometimes hysterical ani- mosity: Clarence Darrow in the Scopes trial, Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mock- ingbird. The images pass easily from history to myth and back again. This is the noble vision of advocacy and it continues to have pertinence. But in daily life, a lawyer is rarely asked to appear in a heroic context. The more ordinary setting in which the zealous advocacy ideal inspires or rationalizes lawyer conduct is the garden variety civil suit or administrative proceeding. When an attorney representing a large corpo- ration engages in oppressive or dilatory discovery practice in a commercial suit, when an attorney representing a cor- porate shareholder brings suit challeng- Continued on page 4 Section of Business Law From the Section Chair... By Larry P. Scriggins A s George Freeman wrote at the out- set of his term as chair, the Section has a tradition of collective leadership. It is rare that any major initiative or accomplishment of the Section can be attributed to the action of any one chair, and this year will be no exception. What happens in our Section is driven by the focus of our members working chiefly through committees on major continu- ing and new issues concerning a broadly diversified group of business lawyers. Providing a framework to facilitate the ability of the Section's members to de- liberate, debate, and produce the vast variety of work product and provide for its appropriate dissemination and pub- lication is the major responsibility of Continued on page 2 IN SIDE Section wins some, loses some in ABA House of Delegates 3 Section Council approves expanded activity 3 The Update is (nearly) dead: Long live Business Law Today 5 Meet our staff 6 It's time to stop polishing the pebbles 7 The ignored effect: Taxes and the calculation of commercial damages 9 Section publications 12 Bank of Kuwait revisited: Client instruction as to delivery of its counsel's legal opinion 16

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most