W. Bradley Wendel. Lawyers and Fidelity to Law. New Jersey, U.S.: Princeton University Press, 2010.
This book reimagines legal ethics as a commitment to the law’s role in resolving deep societal conflicts and maintaining political stability, rather than as a license for lawyers to bend legal rules in service of client interests. This framework is especially vital in backsliding democracies, where legal institutions are strained and lawyers risk becoming either complicit in or resistant to authoritarian encroachment. Wendel argues that attorneys’ ethical obligations must be anchored in fidelity to law as a collective good—thus providing a principled basis for resisting manipulation of legal norms while preserving the legitimacy of legal advocacy.