Alicia Davis
Gregory Hurley
Lawyers are regulated by the state or states in which they have been admitted to practice law. State supreme courts regulate the admission process and adopt professional ethics codes, the substance of which is proposed by the American Bar Association.1
Becoming an attorney can be an intense process. First, most states require that a prospective attorney go to law school. This requires the candidate to take the rigorous Law School Admission Test (LSAT), which gives law schools a means of standardizing and comparing applicants. Then the candidate must be accepted to a law school, which can be a very competitive process.
Finally, to be licensed as an attorney, most states require that the candidate pass a test of legal knowledge and ability. The licensing board must also determine whether the candidate possesses the character and fitness necessary for the practice of law. In many states, the agency administering this exam and making recommendations concerning a candidate’s character and fitness is known as the “Board of Bar Examiners” or the “Board of Law Examiners.”
Some states have separate agencies that oversee the conduct of persons once they are admitted to the bar. Codes of professional conduct—often based on a model code promulgated by the American Bar Association—are administered in all states. The organization usually charged with enforcing these codes is the state supreme court through a state bar, bar association, or ethics unit.
It has not always been this difficult to join the profession, and the professional ethics rules regulating attorneys’ behavior are more exacting than they have been in previous centuries. In some American colonies, each court determined who could practice before it. In others, each court of general jurisdiction determined who could practice before it, but an admission before one court generally permitted one to practice before other courts in the state. Others had a system similar to the one currently used throughout the United States, in that there was a centralized system of admission to the bar.2
Pound notes that professionalization of the bar weakened following the colonial period, reviving after the founding of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 1870 and the founding of the American Bar Association in 1878.3 The Canons of Professional Ethics were adopted by the American Bar Association in 1908.4 According to Cameron, these rules held sway for the succeeding 60 years, at which time the American Bar Association created the Special Committee on Evaluation of Ethical Standards to review the Canons.5 In 1969 the American Bar Association published the first Model Code of Professional Responsibility.6 This document has been amended from time to time, according to lawyers’ and society’s understandings of acceptable professional conduct, and is now known as the Model Code of Professional Conduct.
1James Duke Cameron, “Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions—A Long Overdue Document,” Arizona State Law Journal 19 (1987): 91.2 Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times (St. Paul, MN: West, 1953): 145-47 (summarizing A.Z. Reed’s description in “Training for the Public Profession of the Law,” Bulletin 15 of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching [1921]: 67-68).3 Pound, at 254.4 Cameron, at 92.5 Id.6 Id.
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