A note on the text
I originally wrote the chapters as separate essays, all but two previously published. Chapter 1 dates back over twenty-five years, but the remainder were written over the last decade or so.
I have revised all of them, several quite extensively.Returning to old work is at best a mixed pleasure. I rediscovered some arguments and ideas I had forgotten about. More often, I found substantive errors and stylistic excesses that were sometimes excruciating to read. How could I have thought that? How could I have said it in print? How could I have imagined that this juvenile witticism was clever? In places, my views have evolved over time. Some of the essays floated offhand speculations - trial balloons - that I took up more systematically in subsequent papers, only to discover in the process that my original idea wasn’t quite right the way I originally stated it.
The result was a stack of papers that included inconsistencies of both substance and style. How to proceed? One can take two approaches to anthologizing previously published work. The easy way leaves it intact, on the theory that the anthology’s main purpose is to make scattered, hard-to- find essays available in a single location. Here, I chose the alternative approach: revising and trying to get it right this time around. More than that, I have tried to knit the essays together into a single connected set of arguments. To that end, I have regularized terminology, reconciled inconsistencies, added cross-references, removed redundancies, and shifted material around to more natural points in the argument. In some essays I replaced outdated examples with fresher ones, and bad formulations with what I trust are better ones. In a few places, I substituted pieces of other essays, not included in this book, which had improved on less satisfactory versions of the arguments in the original.
(These substitutions are indicated in the notes.) The only major repair I have not attempted is systematically updating references to the scholarly literature. The literature on legal ethics is voluminous, and it seemed on the whole that it would not be worth the trouble to multiply footnotes. I must therefore ask forgiveness from authors whose important work on the same problems is not cited in these pages because it appeared after my essay was published.I have, however, indulged in substantial self-citation. Normally, selfcitation is an unattractive practice. But over the years I have written papers
presumption, which can be overridden by strong moral reasons to break the role. Where the former conclusion could be read as discounting professional obligations entirely when they conflict with common morality, I now give more presumptive weight to professional obligations. that space doesn’t permit me to include in this book, which offer more detailed treatment of ideas that appear here in abbreviated form. With some effort, I could have incorporated the more detailed treatments. But to save this book from bloat, it seemed simpler to refer readers to papers where I develop subjects merely alluded to here.