By: Caitlin Parets, Scarlett Del Giudice Boyer, & Jenik Radon
Lawyers around the world are bound by codes of ethics designed to protect the legal profession and the individuals it serves, but lawyers need a Hippocratic Oath. Rooted in antiquity and still professed today by medical practitioners, modern iterations of the Hippocratic Oath include promises not only to use one’s medical knowledge to the best of one’s ability but also to “not use [one’s] medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties.” [. . .] Lawyers would benefit from a similar ethical consideration for human rights because sometimes simply following the law does not sufficiently capture ethical practices. The wisdom of Emmanuel Lulin, a lawyer and the Chief Ethics Officer for L’Oréal, sums it up beautifully: “Ethics is not about obeying the law. Ethics is about adhering to shared values. . . . Because very often things can be lawful but awful.” [. . .]
