ABSTRACT
Although I shall say nothing more about Campbell's discussion of legal ethics, I regard this chapter as at least sympathetic to his approach to legal ethics. My aim is to defend a modified form of what has become known as the' standard conception of the lawyer's role', according to which lawyers owe special duties to their clients, the effect of which is to render permissible, or even mandatory, acts which would otherwise be morally impermissible. The conception is colourfully evoked by Macaulay's famous question as to '[w]hether it be right that a man should, with a wig on his head and a band around his neck do for a guinea what, without these appendages, he would think it wicked and infamous to do for an empire'.4
