Article: “‘PC’ Politics Drove ABA’s Proposed Rules Change — A push for new classes of “harassment” in professional ethics reflects hubris and elitism”

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We were grateful that the National Law Journal published the fourth article in the U.S. Justice Foundation’s series on the proposed ABA Ethics Changes.  This Op Ed was the lead in the National Law Journals email to subscribers sent out on August 8, 2016.

We reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from our article:

“The American Bar Association is on the verge of making ­sweeping changes in its Model Rules of Professional Conduct, rules in no way designed to regulate professional ethics, but rather to compel lawyers to embrace social justice to make them ‘better people’….

“Lest anyone think the ABA was focused on improving legal ethics, consider the utopian goal that the ABA set for itself. At the top of the committee’s final report appeared this quote from the president’s February testimony: ‘Lawyers have a unique position in society as professionals responsible for making our society better.… [W]e are the standard by which all should aspire.’ Another ­witness testified: ‘Lawyers are the foundation of American government, the ­justice system, and society in general.’ Such hubris!

“Legal ethics should be predicated on preserving the integrity of the lawyers and the tribunals before which they practice. Defining ‘misconduct’ to include violating today’s notion of ‘political correctness’ in no way relates to the ethics of the legal profession.

“Will the ABA succeed in politicizing legal ethics? By ‘enhancing diversity,’ professional ethics will be used to homogenize the legal profession around the lexicon of liberal identity politics in a quixotic effort to root out bias, as defined by an increasingly coercive secular, leftist, legal elite.”

Link to article