Professional Legal Ethics Critical Interrogations

Ethics and regulation have become catchwords of the late 1990s, yet relatively little has been written about the ethical discourse and regulation of the legal professions in England and Wales. This book represents the first attempt to subject the ethical discourse of the English legalprofessions to in-depth analysis and sustained critique. Drawing on insights from moral philosophy, social theory, the sociology of the legal profession, public law theories of regulation, and the extensive American literature on lawyers' ethics, it argues that, in seeking to provide definitiveanswers to particular problems of professional conduct, professional legal ethics has failed to deliver an approach which requires lawyers actively to engage with the ethical issues raised by legal practice. Through an analysis of the core issues facing lawyers, the authors locate this failure inthe profession's reliance on a liberal and adversarial role morality that conceptualises the ethical values of human dignity, autonomy and equality in a formalistic and narrowly legalistic manner. This encourages lawyers to overlook the real invasions of these values so often wrought by upholdingclients legal rights, and to ignore the competing claims of affected third parties, the wider community and the environment In seeking to move beyond critique, the authors develop throughout the book a contextual approach to individual ethical decision-making and outline a range of institutional,regulatory and educational reforms which, they suggest, could form the basis for a more ethical brand of professionalism. Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis written for lawyers, ethicists and policy-makers interested in this neglected area of professional ethics and regulation.

Donald Nicolson: taught at the Universities of Cape Town, Warwick and Reading before taking up a post at the University of Bristol in 1992. Here he teaches jurisprudence, legal methods, criminal law and gender and the law. He also has a research interest in evidence theory. He is on the editorial board of Evidence and Proof and Legal Ethics and the founder and Director of the University of Bristol Law Clinic.
Julian Webb: After completing a research degree at Warwick University in the early 1980s, Julian held various teaching and research posts in London before moving to the University of the West of England, Bristol in 1988, where he was consecutively a senior and principal lecturer in the Law Faculty and, finally, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies. In March 1999 he returned to London as Professor of Law at the University of Westminster, where he continues to teach and research in the areas of dispute resolution, legal ethics and legal education. He is articles editor of