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30 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 415 (2017)
Legal Ethics and the Situated Lawyer

handle is hein.journals/geojlege30 and id is 433 raw text is: Legal Ethics and the Situated Lawyer MITT REGAN* ABSTRACT Legal ethics scholarship in recent years has moved from a primary focus on ethical reasoning by the individual lawyer to work that reflects greater appreciation of the influence of the contextual settings in which lawyers are situated. This development enriches our understanding of how lawyers identify and respond to situations with ethical significance. As with similar scholarship in psychology, however, it raises questions about the nature, or even the plausibility, of individual agency in light of the power of situational influences. These questions have particular significance for approaches to ethics based on virtue theory, which assumes the ability of individuals to cultivate relatively stable character traits that guide their behavior across various settings. This Essay surveys recent work in psychology, the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) model, which aims to reconcile the insights of situationist psychology with the notion of stable character traits and dispositions. It then describes how recent work in virtue ethics incorporates the CAPS model to construct a more flexible and sophisticated account of character The Essay concludes by exploring the potential implications of this work for legal ethics instruction. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ......................................... 416 I. STUDYING THE SITUATED LAWYER .......................... 417 A. RESEARCH ON THE INDIVIDUAL IN CONTEXT ........... 417 B. THE PERSON-SITUATION DEBATE ...................... 419 II. THE COGNITIVE-AFFECTIVE PERSONALITY SYSTEM MODEL ... 421 A. THE CAPS MODEL AND VIRTUE THEORY ................ 422 * McDevitt Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Georgetown University Law Center. My thanks to Jessica Wolfendale for thoughtful comments on a draft of this Essay. © 2017, Mitt Regan.

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