Ethics

Gillian Hatfield offers this chapter, Producing Law for Innovation.  Abstract

In this chapter, I first discuss why we need to think of legal infrastructure as economic infrastructure requiring focused economic policymaking, what is wrong with our existing legal infrastructure and why we need to change our modes of legal production. I then set out a vision of what greater reliance on market-based production of legal infrastructure could look like. Finally, I suggest some concrete steps that policymakers can take to move us toward a more open, competitive system of legal production. These include 1) opening up access to the provision of legal services, such as by establishing a federal licensing regime that exempts providers from state-based regulation by the bar and state supreme courts and reduces restrictions on the ownership and management of legal providers; 2) establishing the public law framework necessary to enable the emergence of competitive private legal entities to supply legal rules (for corporate governance and commercial contracting, for example); and 3) reducing barriers to international trade in legal services.

Josh Perry (Indiana - Kelley) offers, The Ethical Costs of Commercializing the Professions: First Person Narratives from the Legal and Medical Trenches.  The roadmap paragraph:

The extent to which financial matters serve as a source of moral distress for lawyers and physicians ? and the moral tension between serving the self and serving others ? is an important and under-identified component of professional life. It is this finding from my qualitative research exploring the ?common moral problems in the professions? that I hope to address in this Article. In short, I report on preliminary data that provides rich and textured details of the commerce- related ethical challenges that face legal and medical professionals struggling to act as ethical businesspersons. In Part II, I provide some background context for why this issue is of particular concern to professionals by briefly reviewing the unique elements that characterize professional identity, and the distinct mandate of legal and medical professionals to serve others before the self. Understanding the particular components of professional identity that mark a lawyer?s or physician?s sense of self is critical to understanding the moral angst reflected in many of the first- person narratives. Part III will describe the ?Common Moral Problems in the Professions Project? and present findings from a first-person interview and some survey responses documenting the moral distress that emanates from this personal or systemic conflict between ?doing good? and ?doing well.? While it is difficult to acquire large amounts of qualitative data from lawyers and physicians ? for whom time is literally money ? the narrative responses presented suggest that business and economic issues do contribute a substantial amount of ethical angst to the lives of lawyers and physicians. Following this section on results, Part IV will further discuss these findings and describe more fully the shared moral concerns of lawyers and physicians struggling to meet client and patient needs amid competing systemic, institutional, and personal interests. Concluding remarks about the future of professionalism and the threat of an increasingly commercialized legal and medical environment are offered in Part V.

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