An examination of why lawyers act like slimeballs and what can be done about it. Scientists prefer using lawyers over rats for their experiments, the joke goes, because there are some things rats won’t do. Given this popular conception of lawyers, you would expect a book about the “moral compass” of American lawyers to be exceedingly thin. Zitrin and Langford, who both teach law at the University of San Francisco, take their subject seriously, however, and point to a foundation of our legal system, the adversarial relationship, to explain lawyerly behavior. Conceiving of legal action as the pitting of one side against another requires that everyone have access to representation. Even the worst criminals and most irresponsible corporations must be able to confer in confidence with lawyers, whose role is to further the interests of their client to the best of their ability. This means that legal ethics—which enjoin lawyers to be advocates of particular interests—do not necessarily parallel common notions of morality; lawyers are supposed to serve clients, not seek justice. Zitrin and Langford lay out the attendant dilemmas through real-life examples that pose the problem for the reader, discussion of past cases and doctrine guiding past practice, and ultimately accounts of how the actual cases were resolved. Issues addressed include representing the guilty, withholding evidence, attorney-client privilege, zealousness of representation, pressures generated by large corporate practices, and settlements that withhold vital information from the public. Despite presenting a convincing case for doing away with the adversarial system, however, their suggestions for reform are moderate calls for emphasizing ethics in legal training, reigning in large legal firms, and especially establishing guidelines for lawyers with less “wiggle room.” Whether or not this will really reform a profession filled with “professionally trained wigglers” is open to question. An engaging effort to explain lawyers and their ethical dilemmas to a skeptical popular audience. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-43314-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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