The Ethical Exploitation of the Unrepresented Consumer

Abstract

This article begins in Section I with a brief overview of the debt industry. Section II describes the circumstances of an unrepresented defendant in the adversarial system of justice. The conventional codes of professional responsibility are weighed against a broader framework of normative ethics in Section III. Section IV illustrates how the particulars of the debt-buying setting are emblematic of broader issues. Two solutions are then discussed in Section V: One broadly targets the failure of attorneys’ ethical codes to account for the collapse of the adversarial myth in cases involving unrepresented litigants; the other is a more tailored solution that addresses the specific abuses in the industry which serves as the concrete setting for the Article.