| Description |
1 online resource (xxviii, 276 pages) |
| Contents |
Preface : moral officials, retail justice, and three caveats -- Introduction : seven questions about what is fit for an official to do -- Law and office -- The stakes : the interests of others in official actions -- Officials' obligations arise from more than the law alone -- The moral obligations of legal officials -- Patterns of relationship between legal and moral obligations -- Breaching obligations -- Tools for the trade : maxims and fallacies -- Epilogue : what the official ought to do : law and justice -- Appendix : taxonomy of headings : the lawes and libertyes of Massachusetts (discussed in chapter one) |
| Summary |
What should the people expect from their legal officials? This book asks whether officials can be moral and still follow the law, answering that the law requires them to do so. It revives the idea of the good official - the good lawyer, the good judge, the good president, the good legislator - that guided Cicero and Washington and that we seem to have forgotten. Based on stories and law cases from America's founding to the present, this book examines what is good and right in law and why officials must care. This overview of official duties, from oaths to the law itself, explains how morals and law work together to create freedom and justice, and it provides useful maxims to argue for the right answer in hard cases. Important for scholars but useful for lawyers and readable by anybody, this book explains how American law ought to work |
| Bibliography |
Includes footnotes with bibliographical references, and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Legal ethics -- United States.
|
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Law -- Moral and ethical aspects -- United States
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Law and ethics.
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Administrative responsibility -- United States
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Administrative responsibility
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Law and ethics
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Law -- Moral and ethical aspects
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Legal ethics
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United States
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| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780511533686 |
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0511533683 |
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