One of my most profound and gratifying responsibilities as an Appellate Division Justice is welcoming and admitting to the bar the new attorneys who have demonstrated the requisite fitness and good moral character. As gatekeepers of our prestigious legal profession, we are bound to strictly uphold bar admission guidelines because we want to make sure that those who practice law in this great state will do so with the highest ethical standards.
It is with this same concern that we discipline members of the bar for misconduct. We recognize that the “standards for and administration of lawyer discipline, as with bar admission, determine the quality of our justice system.”1 It is our duty therefore to demand that “lawyers exercise the highest standards of ethical conduct” and to discipline conduct “that tends to reflect adversely on the legal profession as a whole and to undermine public confidence in it.”2 Above all, as the Court of Appeals has made clear, the primary goal of discipline is the protection of the public.3
