Dalhousie Law Journal Volume 39 Issue 1 Article 2 4-1-2016 Of Lodestars and Lawyers: Incorporating the Duty of Loyalty into the Model Code of Conduct Colin Jackson Dalhousie University Richard Devlin Dalhousie University Brent Cotter University of Saskatchewan Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/dlj Part of the Legal Profession Commons Recommended Citation Colin Jackson, Richard Devlin, and Brent Cotter, "Of Lodestars and Lawyers: Incorporating the Duty of Loyalty into the Model Code of Conduct" (2016) 39:1 Dal LJ 37. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Schulich Law Scholars. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dalhousie Law Journal by an authorized editor of Schulich Law Scholars. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Colin Jackson* Of Lodestars and Lawyers: Incorporating Richard Devlin** and the Duty of Loyalty into the Model Code Brent Cotter *** of Conduct The "conflicts quartet" of cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada can be understood as part of a long-standing tension in Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence between two competing conceptions of a lawyer's professional identity In the most recent of these cases, C.N. Railway v. McKercher, the Supreme Court conclusively preferred the loyalty-centred conception of the practice of law over the entrepreneurial conception. While the Federation of Law Societies of Canada amended its Model Code of Professional Conduct in 2014 in response to the Supreme Court's decision in McKercher, this article argues that those amendments did not go far enough. The authors propose a more substantial set of modifications to the Model Code to better entrench the duty of loyalty as a foundational principle of legal ethics.