Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility:
Mandatory Authority

State Codes of Ethics

A state ethics code is generally not a statutory "code" enacted by the legislature. Instead, in most states, including Massachusetts, the code of ethics has been adopted by the highest court in the state.

In print, the state codes of professional ethics are often published with the Court Rules volume(s) that are often included in the annotated statutory code for that state, or in a separate court rules book, for example Massachusetts Rules of Court - State (Law Reserve and Law Pappas KFM 2929 A193 2001)

The National Reporter on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility (Law Looseleaf KF 306 A45 N3) has each state's rules and selected ethics opinions, also available on LexisNexis

Links to many states' codes of ethics are provided at the free internet sources listed below. However, due to less frequent updating, the information may not be as current as that provided in the commercial sources above.


Cases

Judicial opinions on legal ethics can be found in any West's Digest using the Topic "Attorneys and Clients," among others. In addition:

  • American Law Reports (ALR) includes annotations on legal ethics topics, surveying case law from the states. In print, ALR can be found in Pappas Lower, west wall. Also in Westlaw.
  • LexisNexis database of state case law and ethics opinions combined
  • Westlaw database of legal ethics and professional responsibility cases combined
  • search an individuals state's legal ethics cases on Westlaw by entering the database xxeth-cs, where xx is the state's postal abbreviation

Other helpful sources for finding case law include the Annotated Model Rules of Professional Conduct, discussed in the next section. See also the section on Journal Articles & Current Awareness.

Page maintained by: David Bachman
Last updated: February 2009