Law School professor Bradley Wendel discusses his new book, “Ethics and Law: An Introduction” at an April 21 event.

“I think it’s the first general introduction to philosophical legal ethics,” said Tim Dare of law professor Bradley Wendel’s “Ethics and Law: An Introduction” (Cambridge University Press, 2014). “There will be more, I’m sure, but they will be influenced by Brad’s book, which is a groundbreaking book.”

Dare, associate professor of philosophy at University of Auckland, New Zealand, spoke at a celebration honoring the book the Law School’s MacDonald Moot Courtroom April 21.

Wendel “is uniquely well-placed to bring philosophical ethics and jurisprudence to bear on the topic,” said Dare, who offered some background on philosophical legal ethics. He traced the field from its first wave in the late 1970s to the current third wave in which, he said, Wendel is one of the leading figures.

Dare challenged Wendel on a few points, focusing particularly on his treatment of the relationship between ordinary morality and professional ethics, which in the book is represented through the metaphor of a bridge. In this bridge model, Dare explained, material from ordinary morality is used to build a practice or institution that, once established, serves as the immediate ethical framework for practitioners while still allowing, or perhaps demanding, some reference to outside morality.

Speaking next, Greg Cooper, associate professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University, praised Wendel’s book for its interdisciplinary approach, its acknowledgement of the variety of roles within the legal profession and its rare recognition that clients are “something beyond bundles of legal rights.” Cooper further elucidated the difference between first-wave scholars, who would like to see lots of traffic across the bridge, and third-wave scholars like Dare, who “wants you to schlep a bunch of stuff from ordinary morality across the bridge, and then build the institution, and then blow up the bridge.” Adding another twist to the metaphor, Cooper said, “At the end of the day, when you punch out, you go back across the bridge.”

Michele Moody-Adams, the Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University and former Cornell vice provost for undergraduate education, praised Wendel for “the work he is doing to bring together a subtle, finely textured appreciation for what lawyers actually do with a sense that there are still philosophical problems” involving ethics and the very nature of law. Addressing what she saw as a tension in the book between jurisprudential thinking and legal practice, she proposed that “the question of what the law is and what it ought to be, as much as the question of what moral values it ought to embody… can be implicit in the practice of sometimes the simplest kinds of cases.”

“Boy did we overwork the bridge metaphor,” said Wendel in response to the commentators. The bridge, he said, was meant to convey some essential connection between the obligations of a professional role and the moral agency and integrity of the role’s occupant, though the exact nature of that relationship remained problematic. Referring to the theme of contention between philosophers and practitioners, Wendel characterized his approach as coming from “the other side”: “Rather than starting with ethical justifications and then using them as a standpoint to evaluate professional practices, what I tried to do ... is to take a professional practice as a given and then see whether it’s possible to give a philosophically satisfying account of it.”

Wendel remarked that he has tried to bring the fields of jurisprudence and legal ethics closer together. “I’m glad that what came out of the book is the sense that, in order to attend to what lawyers ought to do, one ought to attend to jurisprudence and, conversely, when doing jurisprudence, one necessarily has to engage with the legal profession as an institution.”

Owen Lubozynksi is a writer for the Law School.