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opinion I think this traditional view has had its day. For one thing, it has done a lot of damage to the standing of the legal profession. The public long ago noticed that many lawyers are not much more than amoral guns-for-hire, and is not appreciative of the fact. More than that, lawyers themselves seem increasingly discomfi t- ed about how they have drifted away from the social values em- bodied in the laws they work with. Moral neutrality and technical competence no longer seem enough, not even to most lawyers. Do "cause lawyers" show the way? A cause lawyer is someone who commits himself and his legal skills to furthering a vision of the good society. This is all explained in The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers, a recent book edited by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold. In the introduction, Sarat and Scheingold write, "by reconnecting lawyering with morality, cause lawyers make tangible the idea that lawyering is a 'public profession' and that its contribution to society goes beyond the aggregation, assem- bling, and deployment of technical skills." Cause lawyering, they write, "raises the political question of whose interests are served by the dominant understanding of legal professionalism." I can hear the howls of protest. Does anyone seriously pro- pose that a lawyer, before opening a fi le, should apply some kind of community-based moral test to see whether it's okay for him to take on the assignment? How on earth would that work? The suggestion seems even more preposterous if it implies, for example, that a securities lawyer should make some kind of complex economic judgment about the possible public effects Canadian Labour Law Library Canadian Labour Law Library NEW enhanced online functionality! COMING SOON! Disburse your research costs to your clients. Offers you a complete collection of labour law decisions and commentary. Available on the Internet with enhanced functionality including new easy to use search templates. Featuring the Internet version of: • Canadian Labour Arbitration, Fourth Edition (Brown and Beatty) • Labour Arbitration Cases (LAC), Series 1-4 More than 11,000 LAC decisions • Canadian Labour Arbitration Summaries (CLAS) More than 49,000 CLAS decisions ORDER your copy today Call your Account Manager today for a FREE trial and Internet pricing. canadalawbook.ca MERGING TRADITION WITH TECHNOLOGY For a 30-day, no-risk evaluation call: 1.800.263.2037 Canada Law Book is a Division of The Cartwright Group Ltd Prices subject to change without notice, to applicable taxes and shipping & handling. CL0000 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com FEBRU AR Y 2009 25 CLLL 09 (CL 1-4sq).indd 1 1/22/09 2:19:30 PM A Professional Association of Former Peace Officers. of a proposed transaction. Quite apart from anything else, very few practising lawyers are competent to make such evaluations. Getting back to that economic mess, hardly an economist or fi nancial expert saw it coming or, even today, fully understands what it's all about. What can you expect from a lawyer? But these kinds of objections are only examples of the de- bating trick of reductio ad absurdum. (Merriam-Webster: "lit- erally, reduction to the absurd . . . disproof of a proposition by showing an absurdity to which it leads when carried to its logical conclusion.") They don't damage the proposition that a lawyer, as a well-educated creature of his community, should take into account the values and well-being of that community when he does his work. Sometimes, notwithstanding the siren call of billable hours, he shouldn't open a fi le. And so, if a lawyer, sitting in a conference room with his banker client, thinks that a mortgage applicant will soon default if given what he's asking for; or that a collateralized mortgage obligation is backed by loans that likely will collapse; or that a bond-rating agency hasn't done its homework and is handing out ratings that will mislead investors; or that fi nancial engi- neering is going on that could have incalculable adverse conse- quences; he should stand up, put his hat on, and walk out. Let's see if the legal profession has learnt its lesson. Philip Slayton has been dean of a law school and senior partner of a major Canadian law fi rm. Visit him online at philipslayton.com Let our staff of former Peace Officers handle your Process Serving needs. Canadian Process Serving Inc. United States Process Serving Corp "North America's Most Respected & Trusted Process Serving Companies." Donald J.M. Brown, Q.C. and David M. Beatty Chief Justice of Ontario Editor: E.B. W Consulting Editor: The H onourable W arren K. W illis inkler,