Legal Ethics And Legal Education

The contributions in this volume suggest that "the ethics project in legal education" is increasingly an international one. Even though the strength of commitment by both the profession and the legal academy to "ethics learning" within law schools varies, two fundamental questions confront all who work in this area. First, what is it that we want our students to learn (or, perhaps, in what manner do we want our students to develop) from the teaching of "legal ethics"? Second, how can we create a learning environment that will encourage the nature and quality of learning we think is important? All the contributors to this volume take a strong stand on the importance of ethical legal practice and the role of law schools in developing students’ capacities in this area. They share a belief in the essential need to encourage law students to engage with the moral dimensions of legal practice. The questions that these scholars grapple with are therefore not of the "should we be teaching this?" variety, but "how might we best to go about doing this, so that our efforts within law schools really make some difference?" Each of the chapters in this volume adds uniquely to our understanding of these matters.

Changes in the way law is practiced, and who practices it, demand a new approach to legal ethics and professional responsibility--one that stresses personal responsibility over professional regulation. Hutchinsons book is an accessible introduction to the topic and a provocative call to arms for the profession. This edition includes analysis of the Canadian Bar Associations 2006 Code of Professional Conduct.

Law’s Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools. With characteristic depth and sensitivity, John Borrows brings insights drawn from philosophy, law, and political science to bear on some of the most pressing issues that arise in contemplating the interaction between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal traditions. In the course of a wide-ranging but accessible inquiry, he discusses such topics as Indigenous agency, self-determination, legal pluralism, and power. In its use of Anishinaabe stories and methodologies drawn from the emerging field of Indigenous studies, Law’s Indigenous Ethics makes a significant contribution to scholarly debate and is an essential resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indigenous rights, societies, and cultures.

Once a highly cosmopolitan profession, law was largely domesticated by the demands of the Westphalian state. But as the walls between sovereign states are lowered, law is globalizing in a way that is likely to change law, lawyering and legal education as much over the next 30 years – when the students entering law schools today reach the peak of their profession – as it has over the last 300. This book provides a sustained investigation of the theoretical and practical aspects of legal practice and education, synthesizing and developing nearly thirty years of Professor Sampford’s critical thought, analysis and academic leadership. The book features two major areas of investigation. First, it explains the significance of the ‘critical’, ‘theoretical’ and ‘ethical’ dimensions of legal education and legal practice in making more effective practitioners – placing ethics and values at the heart of the profession. Second, it explores the old/new challenges and opportunities for ethical lawyers. Challenges include those for lawyers working in large organisations dealing with issues from international tax minimisation to advising governments bent on war. Opportunities range from the capacity to give client’s ethical advice to playing a key role in the emergence of an international rule of law as they had to the ‘domestic’ rule of law. The book should stimulate great interest and occasional passion for legal practitioners, students, teachers and researchers of law, lawyering, legal practice and legal institutions. Its inter-disciplinary approaches should be of interest to those with interests in education theory, international relations, political science and government, professional ethics, sociology, public policy and governance studies.

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 legal professions 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 definitive answers 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 in the 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 upholding clients 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.