Professor James E. Moliterno, the Vincent Bradford Professor of Law at Washington and Lee recently published his article, Exporting American Legal Ethics, in the Akron Law Review (43 Akron L. Rev. 769).
Prof. Moliterno explores his view that US Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are too aggressively pushing emerging democracies and post-conflict states to adopt US-style lawyer and judge ethics codes. This push, he explains, is sometimes being done without sufficient attention to the local legal culture. Prof. Moliterno argues that the large-scale adoption of U.S. models of lawyer and judge regulation outside the United States is likely to produce unfortunate results.
Congratulations are due to Professor Moliterno.
But perhaps it should be stressed that if we are exporting our legal rules, shouldn’t our culture be implemented as well, and that includes our lawyering style?
Allowing these countries to develop their own style could lead to their own interpretation of the law.