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Article: The lawyer's conscience. (19th century attorney David Hoffman)
- Article from:
- Policy Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Hoover Institution Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To early generations of Americans, republicanism conveyed two concepts of citizenship: "rights," which limited government, and "responsibilities," which constituted civic virtue. If the former is divorced from the latter, the law becomes a collection of morally neutral legalisms and lawyers mere technicians of the law. The disrepute of the legal profession today comes largely from this very separation. One lawyer who spent his life trying to maintain the proper connection between rights and responsibilities within the legal profession was David Hoffman.
Hoffman was born in 1784, the 11th of 12 children of Dorothea and Peter Hoffman, a prosperous Baltimore ...