ABSTRACT
Legal ethics has two limbs, theoretical legal ethics (TLE), and lawyers' professional obligations. Their significance is that both limbs impact legal practice. The new moral model of TLE is a necessary reform for the legal profession to cure the deficiencies of positivist TLE. Lawyers may now consider ethical issues in clients’ instructions and give ethical as well as legal advice. The new model is important as its principles extend lawyers’ role to one that concerns the law and ethics and this influences lawyers’ performance of their professional obligations.
In many ways, the law is what lawyers want to make it. Ethical ideals of fairness and honesty are embedded in law, although not enough to balance ethical deficiencies in positivist TLE. Lawyers are more than mere interpreters of the law as proposed by positivist TLE. Lawyers are professionals in whom the public place their trust. This bestows upon them an ethical role that the moral TLE will assist lawyers to adopt. Lawyers will more successfully meet their own and the public’s perception of what the legal profession stands for: their clients, professional values, and the public interest as filtered by the concerns of justice.
