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Legal Ethics
Presented By: Amon, Mona Gail S.
Balingit, Niessy T.
Ramos, Irish D.
Susan, Jersel D.
Tiongson, Kathlyn Joanne M.
Villegas, Marielle M.
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Legal Ethics
- is a branch of applied ethics having in with the study and
application of what is right and wrong, good and bad, in the
practice of law.

- refer to the code of conduct regulating and instructing

behavior of persons within the legal profession.

Legal Positivism
- is the thesis that the existence and content of law
depends on social facts and not on its merits
 History of Law

3000 BC 1760 BC
Ancient Egyptian Law King Hammurabi
- formulated the “code of
-based on the concept of Ma’at and Hammurabi” which ___,
characterized by tradition, rhetorical “an eye for an eye, a tooth
speech, social equality and for a tooth”
impartiality.

22nd Century BC 1280 BC

Ancient Sumerian ruler Ur- The Old Testaments
Nammu - takes the form of moral
- had formulated the first law code, imperatives as
which consisted of casuistic recommendation for
statements (“if…then…”). society.
 Important Persons, Theories & Principles
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
- the most-influential philosophers of law from the early modern period,
whose theory of law was a novel amalgam of themes from both the
natural-law and command-theory traditions.
- He also offered some of the earliest criticisms of common-law theory,
which would be developed significantly by theorists in the 18th century.

- For Hobbes, law was the primary instrument of a sovereign by which to

serve the ends of government, which were principally peace and the
personal security of all its citizens.
- he developed the idea that government which ruled effectively by law is
the only bulwark against anarchy or, as he famously put it, “a war of all against all.”
- In his magnum opus, Leviathan (1651), he wrote that “law in general, is not counsel, but command” and
that civil (i.e., positive) laws are “those rules which the common-wealth hath commanded…by word, writing,
or other sufficient sign of the will” that certain actions are to be done or not done.
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- He claimed that natural law and civil law “contain each other and are of equal extent.”
 Important Persons, Theories & Principles
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
- is one of the great philosophers of law in the Western tradition, but
his legacy is unusual and is in fact still developing.
- There are two major themes in Bentham’s thought that extend over
most of his published and unpublished writings on the nature of law.
• First, theme was a relentless and comprehesive critique of
common-law theory and, indeed, an attack on the very idea of
the common law itself.
• Second was an extension and revision of Hobbes's
conception of sovereignty and the idea of law as a kind of
command.
- He defined law as primarily “an assemblage of signs declarative of a
volition conceived or adopted by the sovereign of a state” and so followed Hobbes and earlier theorists in
thinking about law on the model of command.
- And like Hobbes, Bentham used the concept of sovereignty to explain the unity of a legal system as well
as the criteria of legal validity for that system (that is, the criteria in virtue of which any particular norm or
rule was deemed part of the law).
Important Persons, Theories & Principles
John Austin
- the first professor of jurisprudence at University College London in 1826–32.
- Two of his works, the Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832) and Lectures on
Jurisprudence (4th ed. 1879), became standard texts in English legal education and played a pivotal
role in the 20th-century development of legal positivism and of the philosophy of law more generally.
- Austin famously declared that “the existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another,” which
would become an oft-cited slogan of legal positivism.
- Law is the command of the sovereign backed by threat of sanction. Commands are necessarily
general prescriptions that signify a desire of the commanding sovereign that an action be done or not
done.

Hans Kelsen
- a fierce opponent of natural-law theories, identified the central problem of the philosophy of law as
how to explain the normative force of law—i.e., law’s claim to rightfully tell people what they ought to do
(such that, for example, they have an obligation of obedience to the law).
 Important Persons, Theories & Principles
- Kelsen also thought that law’s commands are directed most fundamentally at officials of the legal
system, such as judges, telling them what sanctions to apply to citizens on the basis of the latter’s
conduct.
- He rejected the idea that law’s normative force could derive from its moral status: like all theorists in
the legal-positivist tradition, he acknowledged that laws could fail to be morally justified.

H.L.A Hart
- who spent his academic career at the University of Oxford, the centre of the “ordinary language”
movement associated with J.L. Austin (1911–60) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), framed his
theory as an attempt to understand the ordinary concept of law—the concept familiar to any citizen of
an advanced modern legal system.
- Hart, agreed with Kelsen that the law claims a kind of authority, a right to tell people what they ought
(or ought not) to do, not simply what they must (or must not) do on pain of penalty.
- Hart claimed that wherever a legal system exists, there also exists a “rule of recognition” that
specifies the criteria of legal validity that any rule must satisfy in order to count as a rule of that legal
system. But a rule of recognition is not a Grundnorm, a transcendental presupposition of legal thought.
Important Persons, Theories & Principles
Joseph Raz
- Raz explored in greater depth than Hart or Kelsen the idea that law claims the right to tell citizens
what they must do—what Raz called law’s claim to authority
- Raz defended the “service conception” of authority, according to which law is
genuinely authoritative insofar as it helps the subjects of the law to do what they really ought to do
better than they would without the mediation of the law’s directives.
- According to Raz, is that if what the law tells someone to do is not intelligible independent of
the moral and other reasons on which it is based, then the law cannot possibly perform a service for its
subjects.

Ronald Dworkin
- Dworkin argued that Hart’s account of the rule of recognition as a convergent practice of officials to
which they took a critical reflective attitude could not explain why such officials had any obligation to
comply with a rule so conceived.
 Important Persons, Theories & Principles
John Finnis
- He argued that any theory of a social phenomenon, including law, must identify its “central” cases,
since the goal of any theory is to describe the central or important features of the subject matter in
question.
- According to Finnis, the central cases of law, are those in which there exists a genuine moral
obligation to obey the law.
- Finnis thus treated as the task of legal theory the identification of those characteristics of legal
systems that are so morally good as to justify anyone’s obedience.

Karl Llewellyn
- the law is generally indeterminate in the sense that the authoritative legal sources (such as
statutes, precedents, and constitutions) do not justify a unique decision.
- According to Llewellyn, a judge almost always has the latitude to characterize a decision in an
earlier case in either a highly fact-specific way, so as to distinguish it from the present case, or in a
way that abstracts from the specific facts of the earlier case, so as to make it binding in the present
case.
Relevance in our Present Society
 Ethics in any profession are crucial and it is perhaps more pressing in the legal
profession where lawyers especially are viewed with suspicion. Thus an enforced
code of conduct is vital in ensuring the credibility of the practioner and legal system
as a whole.
 Often lawyers and other practioners are forced with conflicting interest from the client
they represent, society at large and personal interest. Legal ethics are therefore
important in helping the lawyer navigate the delicate balance of these interests and
work to promote the greatest good.
 Ethics also serve to safegaurd the interest of the client being represented and
ensure they receive service without discrimination
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