Foreword to Symposium on "Should the Family Be Represented as an Entity?": Reexamining the Family Values of Legal Ethics

This symposium on whether the family should be represented as an entity marks another milestone in the development of legal ethics as a field central to understanding the operation of law in our society, and not merely as a set of dry, largely irrelevant rules. It does so by acknowledging that ethical rules of lawyers who represent families have very real consequences for those families. Building on earlier efforts to address this topic, this symposium's authors confront what some commentators have described as the individualist impulse of the ethics codes and whether this impulse is beneficial or harmful to families.