Codes of professional responsibility for lawyers: ethics or law?

The American Bar Association has three times in this century produced a code of ethics for lawyers. The movement has clearly been from a general, hortatory format to one of a statement of principles of law. In the ABA's latest effort, the problems of client confidentiality loom as the most serious and most difficult to solve. The question of ethics versus law weighs heavily in this context, and the ABA's latest resolutions of the confidentiality problems are found to be unsatisfactory.