For Immediate Release
September 26, 2007

Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

Professor David Luban

WASHINGTON, D.C. - What role do lawyers play in enhancing human dignity and human rights?  And should the legal system excuse lawyers from moral obligations that conflict with their professional ones? 

Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Luban grapples with these questions and others in his new book, "Legal Ethics and Human Dignity" (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Luban contends that all lawyers, not just human rights lawyers, have an important role to play in upholding human dignity.  He writes, "If the rule of law is a necessary condition for human rights and human dignity, lawyers in all fields will play a vital role in securing these goods.  And the ethical character of the legal profession – the commitment of lawyers to the rule of law and the human dignity it helps secure – will determine whether the rule of law is anything more than a slogan."

The book explores fundamental issues of legal ethics from the standpoint of human dignity and its defense.  It focuses on how lawyers enhance human dignity, but also what goes wrong when they assault human dignity rather than upholding it.  Chapters on willful ignorance, wrongful obedience and group pressures to wrongdoing examine the pathologies of large organizations – including law firms – that make moral action more difficult.  In one chapter, Luban offers a comprehensive analysis of what he calls "the torture lawyers of Washington" - U.S. government lawyers whose work the author believes legitimized abusive treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Luban is University Professor and Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown Law, where he teaches courses on the American legal profession, international criminal law and legal justice, as well as several seminars.  He has also taught in Georgetown Law’s Center for Applied Legal Studies.  

Prior to coming to Georgetown in 1997, Luban taught at the University of Maryland, Yale University and Kent State University.  He has held visiting appointments in law at Harvard, Stanford and Yale Law Schools, and visiting appointments in philosophy at Dartmouth College and the University of Melbourne.  He was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institutes in Frankfurt and Hamburg.

Luban has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  He was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Keck Fellowship for distinguished scholarship in legal ethics and the Sanford D. Levy Award of the New York State Bar Association.  He is the author of numerous books and articles on legal ethics, legal theory, international criminal law, just war theory and U.S. torture policy.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.

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