Toward a Community-Based Ethic for Legal Services Practice

57 Pages Posted: 8 Jul 2005

Abstract

This Article is concerned with legal services lawyers and how they ethically might allocate their time and resources among their clients. Part I of this Article describes the institutional terrain of legal services practice and introduces the concept of the lawyer as street-level bureaucrat, operating within a complex, high demand human services bureaucracy. Part II discusses the problems inherent in attempts to ration care within a subsidized law practice. The purpose of Part II is to reveal the practice tensions that establishment professional ethics fail to accommodate, and that form an underlying justification for a discussion of triage principles. Part III then describes a model of community-based ethics that can serve as the basis for a triage system in a beginning attempt to lessen the internal contradictions of poverty law work.

Keywords: Poverty law, triage system, professional ethics, legal services lawyers, human service bureaucracy, subsidized law practice, triage principles

Suggested Citation

Tremblay, Paul R., Toward a Community-Based Ethic for Legal Services Practice. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=753564

Paul R. Tremblay (Contact Author)

Boston College - Law School ( email )

885 Centre Street
Newton, MA 02459-1163
United States

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