As someone who studies and writes about legal ethics (which is often more like the law of lawyers instead of ethics), I find the absence of specific plaudits for exemplars in the “right direction” is glaring.  To help fill this void I direct you to ethisphere.com’s list of 2010’s 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics.  As the web site explains:

Some are world famous and some are unknown, but from designing sustainable packaging to recovering billions of dollars from ponzi schemes, the following 100 individuals have impacted the world of business ethics in ways that will continue to resonate for many years.

Believe it or not, many of those listed here – like the Delaware Supreme Court, William Sessions, and Irving Picard among others – are lawyers.  Kudos to you all.

On an ethics note (as opposed to the law of lawyering), the New York Times is discontinuing Randy Cohen’s column the Ethicist.  It’s not clear why, but Ethicist fans should not fret.  Cohen is developing a program for public radio entitled “A Question of Ethics.”