New Horizons in Professional Responsibility

In the last five years the organized bar in the United States—represented by the American Bar Association, which provided the leadership, and by the state bars, which have given staunch support to the ABA—has moved forward to two major and sweeping decisions for change and progress and appears well on the way to a third. The first to come to fruition was the Code of Professional Responsibility, the landmark reformulation of the ethical standards of the legal profession adopted by the ABA House of Delegates in 1969, and now in effect either as court-adopted rules or as rules adopted by the organized bar in forty-three states and the District of Columbia. The second movement now well under way is the new awareness on the part of the bar of the importance of devising and operating more effective systems of professional discipline. The third movement, now only in its incipient stage, is that to create a National Institute of Justice as a federal, nonprofit corporation modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and able to receive both governmental and private funds