Developing Standards of Conduct for Prosecutors and Criminal Defense Lawyers

This issue and a companion issue of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly together collect sixteen papers on the professional conduct of prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers. Typically, normative scholarship on lawyers’ professional conduct focuses on what the ethics rules and other laws require, or should require, of lawyers. These pieces are different, because their principal focus is not on whether lawyers’ conduct is minimally ethical or lawful, but on how lawyers should practice within the bounds of the ethics rules and other law. That is because the authors were asked to take unenforceable professional standards, the ABA Criminal Justice Standards for Prosecution and Defense Functions, as their point of departure