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26 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 481 (2013)
Are Legal Ethics Ethical; A Survey Experiment

handle is hein.journals/geojlege26 and id is 507 raw text is: Are Legal Ethics Ethical? A Survey Experiment STEPHEN R. GALOOB* AND Su LI** ABSTRACT Many core questions in legal ethics concern the relationship between ordinary morality and rules of professional conduct that govern lawyers. Do these legal ethics rules diverge from ordinary morality? Is the lawyer's role morally distinctive? Do professional norms establish what the lawyer has most reason to do? Conjectured answers to these questions abound. In this Article, we use methods from moral psychology and experimental philosophy to provide the first systematic, empirical examination of these questions. Results from a survey experiment suggest that legal ethics rules about advocacy and confidentiality diverge from lay moral judgments; that lay judgments do not, in general, attribute distinctive moral significance to the lawyer's role; and that norms of professional conduct can change (but do not fully determine) the ordinary moral status of lawyers'actions. We conclude by discussing some theoretical and policy implications of these results. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.......................................... 482 1. THREE EMPIRICAL QUESTIONS ABOUT LEGAL ETHICS ........ 484 A. DO LEGAL ETHICS RULES DIVERGE FROM ORDINARY MORALITY?.................................... 484 B. HOW MUCH DOES THE LAWYER'S ROLE MATTER MORALLY? .................................... 491 * Ph.D. Candidate, Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley; (beginning fall 2013) Assistant Professor of Law, University of Tulsa College of Law. We are grateful to participants at a panel on Comparative Legal Ethics at the 2012 meeting of the Law and Society Association and an audience at the 2012 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies for feedback. Special thanks to John Bliss, Steve Bundy, David Fontana, Michael Gilbert, Patrick Hanlon, Adam Hill, Daniel Ho, Sung Hui Kim, Christopher Kutz, Robert Lawless, Ethan Leib, Rob MacCoun, Joy Milligan, Victoria Plaut, Kevin Quinn, Keramet Reiter, Deborah Rhode, Naomi Schoenbaum, Bill Simon, Christina Stevens, the JSP working group, participants in the interdisciplinary seminar on moral psychology at U.C. Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the staff of the Experimental Psychology Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley (including Miho Tanaha and Rowlima del Castillo). This research was supported by a grant from the Alumni Fund of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. @ 2013, Stephen R. Galoob and Su Li. ** Statistician, Center for the Study of Law & Society, University of California, Berkeley. 481

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