Abuse of Law and Advocacy

The essay explores the world of Jurisprudential Legal ethics, which ever closer claims the status of jurisprudential issue deeply woven into the contemporary debate about the concept and the nature of law. The paper briefly explores the leading jurisprudential theories about the lawyer’s role, in attempt to outline that the conceptualization of the lawyers’ role and the nature of their professional commitments are both a function of the concept of law we adopt, mainly focusing on the “positivist turn” in legal ethics. In the conclusive section the paper I address the abuse-of-law filtes thesis of lawyering. Such reading moves from the idea that legal rules do not provide about their own application, thus there is room for a general practical discourse that regards the scope of advocacy and provides a proper role for legal ethics that would be independent from the bare respect of the settled law.