The Canons of Legal Ethics* By George P. Costigan, Jr. Dean of the College of Law of the University of Nebraska I HAVE been asked to say something to you on the subject of a Code of Legal Ethics, and I have interpreted that to be a request to say something about the particular code which is now before the bar of the United States for adoption—the American Bar Associa tion's Canons of Legal Ethics. At the outset I want to say a word about the reasons which led the Ameri can Bar Association to adopt canons of ethics. If one is asked to name the professions other than the ministry in which practitioners are confronted most frequently with important moral prob lems, I think his answer would be that they are law and medicine. If then he should be asked which profession he naturally would expect to be the first to codify rules of professional conduct for its members, his answer would almost certainly be the law, since codification is the lawyer's work; but the slightest investigation would show that as a matter of fact the medical profession has been years ahead of us in adopting a code. As the physician is often the most careless about taking medicine, so the lawyer has been the most careless about applying law—rules of conduct— to himself. The ethical Code of the American Medical Association, to which I understand the various state and other local medical associations give loyal adherence, was adopted in its present form by that association in 1903, while the American Bar Association's Canons of Legal Ethics were not adopted by "An address delivered before the Lancaster County Bar Association at Lincoln, Neb., on March 27, 1909.
that Association until last summer. Apart from the need of a code of Legal Ethics, one motive for its adoption was that the lawyers of America should not be behind their brethren of the medical profession in announcing those funda mental rules of professional conduct by which all members of the profession should be bound. But a far deeper motive is to be found in the reports of the American Bar Association's Committee on Code of Professional Conduct. The changing con ditions of professional practice, tending in the direction of commercializing a large part of the bar of the country, both in and out of our cities, and in particular the weakening of an effective profes sional public opinion due chiefly to the growth of large cities with their infinite possibilities of concealed wrongdoing, have combined, in the opinion of reflec tive lawyers, to create a situation call ing for something more definite in the way of rules of professional ethics than we have had in the past. Then, too— and here is where my own interest in the matter has been most aroused—there has been and is infinite need of an authoritative statement in simple and readily accessible form of rules of ethical professional conduct to be impressed upon our young men as they start upon their professional careers. In our pro fession it is as true as it is elsewhere, that if we train up the young man in the way he should go, in after life he will not depart therefrom. Before the American Bar Associa tion's Committee went to work upon an
