Blackwell Reference Online

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The history of legal ethics is often traced to a retired Presbyterian Sunday School teacher, George Sharswood, who went on to become the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania and founder of the law school at the University of Pennsylvania. In the midst of the tumultuous 1850s, Sharswood observed that the moral temptations and perils were great, perhaps too much for lawyers to resist: “There is no class…among whom moral delinquency is more marked and disgraceful” ( Sharswood, 1854: 170 ). In prescribing a set of professional ethics for members of the bar, he reasoned: “the responsibilities, legal and moral, of the lawyer, arise from his relations to the court, his professional brethren, and to his client” ( Sharswood, 1854: 174 ). “It is the duty of counsel,” Sharswood wrote, “to be the keeper of the conscience of the client; not to suffer him, through the influence of his feelings or interest to do or say anything wrong in itself, of which he would afterward repent” ( Sharswood, 1854: 175 ). The ethical principles found in the writing of Sharswood, as well as the scholarship of David Hoffman and Thomas Goode Jones, laid a foundation for the development of early state codes of ethics for lawyers (Alabama adopted one of the first codes in 1887), and the passage of the American Bar Association's (ABA) Canons of Professional Ethics (1908) ( Papke, 1986 ). Table 1  Core issues in legal ethics ... log in or subscribe to read full text