“I just know we’re forgetting something! “Effects”? No, that’s not it…”Ethanol”? No, no…”Prosthetics”? Arrrgh! What IS it?”

This is as disheartening and it is shocking. The American Bar Association Journal, the monthly magazine of the nation’s largest lawyer organization and in many ways the face of the legal profession in the United States, just announced its 6th Annual Blawg 1oo, its reader-chosen list of the best law-related blogs on the web. There are many excellent blogs honored, of course; indeed all of them are useful or entertaining. I’ve visited most of them, and some, like Popehat, the Legal Professions Blog, Above the Law, the Volokh Conspiracy, Scotus Blog,  the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, and Over-Lawyered, I check on several times a week. There is a remarkably wide range of blog topics covered, including superhero law, practicing law in China and zombies. Guess what’s not covered?

Legal ethics.

Oh, many of the blogs explore legal ethics topics in their specific specialty from time to time and even regularly, especially the ones I cited above, and the Legal Professions Blog is all about lawyer misconduct and discipline, which involves legal ethics but which is not the same thing. However, the nation’s pre-eminent legal ethics blog, the superb Legal Ethics Forum operated  and contributed to by John Steele, Brad Wendel, David Hricik, Andrew Perlman, Steve Lubet, Anita Bernstein, Stephen Berenson, Monroe Friedman, Robert Vischer, Alice Wooley, Roy Simon, Stephen Gillers, Renee Nake, Richard Painter, Dana Remus, Prof. Kathleen Clark, and Nicole Hyland, a genuine all-star team of legal ethics experts and scholars, is not on the list.

 What does it say about the legal profession’s orientation and priorities that more ABA members read a blog about zombies than visit an authoritative  daily compendium of significant new developments in attorney ethical standards? What message does the American Bar Association send, not only to its members, but to the members of the public who must trust them with the most important transactions and conflicts in their lives, with a list indicating that legal ethics—including honesty, keeping client confidences, zealous and diligent representation, reasonable fees, avoidance of conflicts of interest, upholding the integrity of the justice system and more—isn’t among the top hundred important legal topics for its members to follow?

Elsewhere in the same issue of the Journal that announced the 2012 list is a story about how the public’s trust in lawyers seems to be diminishing.

I wonder why!

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Graphic: Fakt