Moral Disengagement and Lawyers: Codes, Ethics, Conscience, and Some Great Movies

The American justice system is premised in large part on the notion that all accused parties are entitled to representation, regardless of guilt or innocence. This tenet requires attorneys to divorce their personal convictions from their professional representations, resulting, in the author\u27s view, in moral disengagement. The author examines the effect such rationalization has on attorneys\u27 behavior when confronting ethical dilemmas and finds cinematographic examples of this theory in a review of movies with legal themes