Expantion of Ethical Requirements Applied to Advocacy Beyond Professional Activities of Advocates

Abstract

The paper deals with an expansive interpretation of the law and application of ethical norms existing and applicable to advocates, which is reflected in the stricter requirements for advocates both within the framework of their professional activities and beyond them, i.e., in fact, even in their private life, giving examples from the history of the Bar in ancient Rome and the Russian Empire. The paper analyzes the mechanism for the formation and expression of public opinion with regard to advocates with allowance for the degree of objectivity of public opinion, as well as for the opinion of the advocates' community itself regarding the morals of its individual representatives. The author, using the A.V. Lekhovitskiy case as an example, demonstrates an extremely rigid attitude of Russian advocates involved in jury proceedings to the moral requirements applied to attorneys-at-law and how they and their assistants complied with them and examines the reasons for such attitude.