«Morality is itself a Practice»

Abstract

Legal ethics is an extraordinary institution in jurisprudence, which arose and exists as an ethical-intellectual and ethical-practical institutional response to the ethical-legal challenges that arise in the professional activities of lawyers, in overcoming which the capabilities of legal instruments are limited. Professional codes of ethics are an integral basis of legal ethics. Of course, a meaningful assimilation of ethical and professional principles and standards of legal activity is required. But legal ethics, despite the importance of professional codes, is not homogeneous with them. Ethical codes must “work” and not be “sleeping institutions”; the principles and rules recorded in them must be practically implemented in the work of lawyers, their official activities and off-duty behavior. This is the mission of legal ethics, the implementation of which is by no means an easy task. The purpose of the work is to consider the features of legal ethics in the plane of its institutional effectiveness in the work of lawyers. To achieve this, the article shows the “embeddedness” of legal ethics in the sphere of law and the professional activities of lawyers, and examines the structural blocks of the mechanism that support the practical effectiveness of legal ethics. Conventionally, they are designated as follows: “ethical”, “coercive”, “disciplinary”, “new challenges”. Their description is given and the results of the work are summarized.