Ethical Responsibility in the Legal Profession important

Ethical responsibility is certainly central and critical to the legal profession’s collective reputation and, consequently, the level of confidence it inspires in the public.

“The rules on ethics challenge us not only to profess the technical canons but also to probe the deeper questions of a lawyer’s moral conduct and examine the possible ways in which each of us may be perpetuating injustice.”

Supreme Court Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa stressed this yesterday to the members of the legal community who took part in the fourth leg of the Ethics Caravan for the Proposed Code of Professional Responsibility and Accountability (Ethics Caravan) held on 11 January 2023 at Gevers Hall, Saint Louis University in Baguio City.

Caguioa, Chairperson of the Supreme Court Committee on Legal Education and Bar Matters, Justice Caguioa, highlighted the significance of ethical responsibility in the legal profession and how the same must be unqualifiedly reflected in the proposed Code of Professional Responsibility and Accountability.

He said when the legal community speaks of ethical responsibility, it speaks of the very bedrock of the legal profession, or “the way of life that challenges us to orient it with our understanding of the law.”

Caguioa also said the uprightness and sense of justice that lawyers practice and argue for as well as plead and teach about are best reflected in the ways with which lawyers are able to hold themselves to account.

“Ethical responsibility is certainly central and critical to the legal profession’s collective reputation and, consequently, the level of confidence it inspires in the public,” Justice Caguioa said.

As an experienced former private practitioner as well as from his years of serving as Chief Presidential Legal Counsel, Justice Caguioa shared with the Ethics Caravan participants that “the unchanging call was to exercise all forms of creative problem-solving skills within the contours of what the laws allowed; to work and argue and present innovative and legally defensible routes within the system, without needing to undermine it. For true, legal acuity and courageous integrity are key to good lawyering winning the game.”

Also given emphasis was the ethical responsibility in the legal profession covers not only the acts lawyers are prohibited from engaging in, “but also positive acts which we must engage in if we are to better contribute to the very communities to which we belong.”