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14 Ratio Juris 1 (2001)

handle is hein.journals/raju14 and id is 1 raw text is: Ratio Juris. Vol. 14 No. 1 March 2001 (1-9) Lawyers' Professional Ethics- Do They Exist? AULIS AARNIO Abstract. The author's aim is to prove that certain moral principles will always be etched into laws when the interest of society demands it and when morality as a set of norms guiding behavior no longer functions in an expected manner outside the system of law. In this paper, it is argued that morality is constituted within the law in a more profound way as well as in a way which is also much more difficult to identify than, for example, conventional instructions concerning professional ethics may indicate. The main thesis is that de facto there are no particular professional ethics of lawyers beyond or above the ethical principles binding all people. The story goes that in old Japanese society, which Akira Kurosawa describes for example in his film Seven Samurai, the most suitable person to be a judge was the one who knew both parties best. Such a person was able to take into account the circumstances of the case and even its hidden facts better than an unfamiliar person. In modern Western society, in a society in which we live, this situation would be impossible. We say without batting an eyelid: Too close a relationship to the interested parties disqualifies the judge. However, the problem is more complex than it looks at first sight. Whether the example is literally true or not, the Japanese judge of the example was bound by the moral principles of the society, by a code, which each decision-maker had internalized. The same code drove a Samurai from one feat of valor to another, and the same code still inspired courtly poetry in the Middle Ages. The moral code safeguarded members of a community and produced legal protection. The difficulty of modern and postmodern society lies in the fact that this sort of a shared moral code, which lends coherence to a community, has disintegrated a great deal. We have been obligated to replace the code with various kinds of quite complex disqualification provisions, which are to guarantee the neutrality of the judge. Legal rules have been substituted for moral codes. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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