Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations

Ethics and regulation have been 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 attempts 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 conceptualizes the ethical values of human dignity, autonomy and equality in a formalistic and narrowly legalistic manner. The text is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis written for lawyers, ethicists and policy-makers interested in this neglected area of pr

Review:

Nicolson and Webb's lucid exploration of specifically Anglo-Welsh professional ethics is extremely valuable, both for its comprehensive coverage of the issues and for its critical appraisal of them...This is an excellent book. Its assessments are clear-eyed and convincing...It works both as an outstanding primer on the current debate on adversarial ethics and as a serious proposal for their future. I highly recommend it. Emily Henderson Cambridge Law Journal detailed treatment of a formidably wide range of legal ethics. David Wood, Journal of Law and Society Vol 27 No 3 (2000)