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Despite its flaws, legal scholars defend the adversary system. Notes a law school dean: "You have to compare it to alternatives. The adversary system works better than anything else available." Nonetheless, bar officials realize that the system requires improvement. In an effort to make it function better, a blue-ribbon committee of the A.B.A. is currently revising the 1969 Code of Professional Responsibility. A vague, well-meaning document, the code provides few clear-cut answers to the problems facing the modern legal profession. A.B.A. President William Spann asks, for example, "Is the lawyer obligated to blow the whistle on a client who ignores his legal advice and violates the law?" The answer is muddy under the current code, but most lawyers generally reply no. A Syracuse attorney retained by a murder suspect concealed from police the victims' grave site and later offered to trade his information to authorities in return for lenient treatment of his client. Last month the state bar ethics committee ruled that the lawyer had acted properly.

An ethics code revision is clearly needed, and the best in the profession want to see it done —and enforced. "Lawyering," suggests Eric Schnapper, a New York public interest attorney, "is within the relatively narrow category of occupations where borderline dishonesty is fairly lucrative. In many instances, the very art of the lawyer is a sort of calculated disregard of the law or at least of ordinary notions of morality." Under the current code, he notes, only selected and flagrant violations result in a disbarment. Writes Schnapper: "One searches in vain for a lawyer disciplined for failing to give free legal assistance to the indigent, for failing to disclose legal precedent contrary to his client's interests, for misrepresenting facts to judges, juries or opposing counsel, or for using political office or connections to attract clients, although the frequency of these occurrences is common knowledge."

Even with a more clear-cut ethics code, it will be no easy task to root out a number of legal practices that inflate clients' bills, slow down the due administration of justice and provoke public hostility. "Lawyers love to play games," says Dallas Attorney G. William Baab. The games are invariably good for the lawyer, occasionally good for his client and rarely good for society. Among them:

DELAY. Thanks to overcrowded, harried courts, lawyers can often find ways to protract a shaky case indefinitely. Postponements, recesses, objections, motions, depositions, unavailability of client or lawyer—the list of stalling techniques is endless. Sometimes the intent is to squeeze a cash-starved opponent into a disadvantageous settlement. Or it can be even more pernicious. In Chicago, an attorney for a notorious dope dealer won 72 postponements over four years on the ground that he had trials elsewhere. A judge finally tired of that game and ordered the trial to proceed; the jury needed only 30 minutes to return with a conviction. Another way to wear down the opposition is to "paper" a case by filing motion after motion, each requiring a timeconsuming, costly response. This leads to what one judge calls a "Brobdingnagian procedural imbroglio."