Kim Economides

The legal profession in England and Wales

This book by one of the leading international legal academics is a study of the origins, development, current state and likely future of the legal profession in England and Wales. Based on a review of existing sources, as well as original research, this book provides a wide range of facts on all aspects of the legal profession: solicitors and barristers; professional associations; legal education and academia; and links with the judiciary and politics. Who are the lawyers? What are the structures of their practices, and what are the links between the different groups? What do they earn? How are they regulated? How are they responding to the new pressures in modern society?

The Determination of Legal Services Policy in the United Kingdom and the United States of America

In this paper, factors are analysed which will influence the formation and implementation of legal services policy in the United Kingdom and the United States of America over the coming years. Despite important political differences between these countries and between the political parties operating inside them, a broad consensus about the aims and, to a lesser extent, the delivery of legal services has emerged, which is closely allied to the political assumptions of the welfare state. The authors contend that the parameters of current political debates in relation to legal services have been narrowly circumscribed, with the result that fundamental policy choices existing beyond the legal aid consensus have rarely been confronted by policymakers. To understand future developments it is important to consider not only current policy agendas but also the wider environment within which policymakers must operate. The authors conclude by identifying those forces underlying the political and policy processes which may cause the legal aid consensus to collapse and so pave the way for new, not necessarily ideal, policies. In this context, the authors pay particular attention to the commitment to the welfare state, the market for legal services, the revolution in information technology, and legal research and education.

Anglo-American conceptions of professional responsibility and the reform of Japanese legal education: creating a virtuous circle?

IN THIS article I describe how ethics and the professional responsibilities of lawyers have become increasingly prominent in debates on the future of mainstream legal education in Anglo-American and other common law jurisdictions. How are these debates in the West impacting on the current reform of Japanese legal education and, vice versa, could these reforms influence developments here? My observations build on those made during a previous visit to Japan when I delivered a lecture on ethical legal education. Now, a decade on, I am encouraged to see that real progress is being made with widening participation and the implementation of liberalising reforms designed not only to introduce an ethical perspective into the training of modern Japanese lawyers but that other educational models, including clinical legal education and developments in simulationbased learning, are also under active consideration by Japanese reformers. Yet it is with some irony that virtual learning environments (VLEs) recently developed in the UK, but modeled on Japanese computer games technology, are being re-cycled and exported back to Japan along with ethical perspectives that are such an ingrained part of traditional Japanese legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and social responsibility. If Japanese

Roundtable on Legal Ethics in Legal Education: Should it be a Required Course?

At the International Legal Ethics Conference IV held at Stanford Law School between 15 and 17 July 2010, one of the two opening plenary sessions consisted of a panel who debated the proposition that legal ethics should be mandatory in legal education. The panel included leading legal ethics academics from jurisdictions around the world both those where legal ethics is a compulsory part of the law degree and those where it is not. It comprised Professors Andrew Boon, Brent Cotter, Christine Parker, Stephen L Pepper and Richard Wu, and was organised and chaired by Professor Kim Economides. We present here an edited version of the panels discussion. It provides a useful summary of the state of legal ethics teaching in the jurisdictions represented as well as a marshalling of the arguments for and against legal ethics as a required course in the university law degree.

Should Lawyers Swear

Legal Ethics started over a decade ago, having first appeared in the summer of 1998. As founding Editors we have steered the journal through its initial phase and sought to provide a solid platform from which academic and practising lawyers can report, debate and reflect on current developments that shape the content and boundaries of professional responsibility. We have been particularly keen to include material that stimulates awareness of ethical issues amongst law students, legal scholars and lawyers in the UK but, at the same time, have encouraged contributions—sometimes working with guest editors on special issues—that draw widely upon international experience as well as developments taking place in other professions and disciplines. In the process the journal has made, in our view, some particularly strong contributions to the discussion of professional education and regulation. Our aims have been simple but challenging: to identify and disseminate rigorous scholarship that has the capacity to deepen our understanding of the ethical in law and legal practice, and to inform or improve education and professional conduct so that ultimately the public may have better access to good lawyers, both now and in the future. We believe that achieving this aim is vital not only in the interests of consumers of legal services, but also for the moral and economic health of the legal profession itself, and indeed society at large. Given the continuing need for independent lawyers and judges to resolve social conflict fairly in ever more hostile, competitive and vulnerable financial environments, it is perhaps surprising that this gap was not identified in the UK context, and filled, much earlier than it was. Credit must go to the prescient Ross Cranston who made an especially valuable contribution by bringing ethics to the attention of the Society of Legal Scholars (then the SPTL) when, in 1993, he took professional responsibility and legal ethics as the theme of his presidential address.1 While we take some pride in the role of the journal in following through this breakthrough, we must also acknowledge that progress here has not been nearly as rapid or substantial as we might have expected or hoped for. Legal Ethics, Volume 11, No. 1

Teaching Ethics and Professionalism: A Lesson from the Antipodes

Having focused attention on developments in professional regulation we return in this issue to the educational agenda and recent experience in Australia and New Zealand promoting professional standards and ethical legal practice through curriculum reform. These two jurisdictions currently are leading the common-law world with innovative experiments based in law schools designed ultimately to enhance and enrich the quality of lawyering. Our two lead articles discuss the principal findings of experiments taking place within both clinical and mainstream legal education which raise some important issues that we think need to be debated elsewhere. How do law teachers communicate professionalism to future lawyers (can they avoid doing so?) and to what extent should their efforts be confined to the classroom? Should it be law schools or the professional bodies driving change in our attitude toward professional responsibility and what is the scope for collaboration between these, and other, stakeholders? If knowledge of law and legal rules is not sufficient what more is needed to guarantee the production of “good lawyers”? Mary Anne Noone and Judith Dickson, both based at La Trobe University in Melbourne, examine the context of Australian debates on these issues and the potential of clinical approaches to enhance student awareness of professional responsibility. While the history and demographics of the Australian legal profession has followed a quite different path to that in England, not least because of its federal structure, physical and human geography and that fact that some states have adopted contrasting positions on fusion, the two systems nevertheless share common roots and face very similar challenges.1 Globalisation, technology and other challenges in the form of MDPs confront all modern legal professions which also need to be ever more inclusive. The issue in Australia, as elsewhere, is not so much whether to reinforce professionalism and professional values, but how. One answer developed at La Trobe is clinical legal education. As Noone and Dickson acknowledge, ethics has long been an integral—some might say unavoidable —part of the clinical experience. As Simon Rice has put it (again drawing on the Australian experience): Legal Ethics, Volume 4, No.2

Procedural Delay in the Developing Middle East

Abstract In this article, I explore whether and how Middle Eastern legal process can be reconciled with the idea of timeliness. The idea that any procedure physically within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions could be both fair and expeditious may appear counterintuitive to those brought up in the Anglo-American legal tradition, and the suggestion that there could exist a notion of “timely Middle Eastern procedure” that produced just and fair results is more than likely to be treated as an oxymoron. Administrative, political and legal processes throughout the Levant and Arab world are, when viewed through Western eyes, more than likely to be characterised as corrupt, slow or even Kafkaesque. I argue that procedural delay is an inherently problematic and relative concept, both legally and culturally speaking, which cannot make sense without introducing robust time standards against which court processing time can be evaluated. I seek to elucidate the fundamental nature and causes of procedural delay in relation to civil trials and propose the adoption of a distinct methodology that could be used to more objectively assess court efficiency in handling civil cases throughout the GCC and MENA regions.

The Ring of Gyges and Legal Ethics

In this editorial we begin with a story: the legend of the ring of Gyges.1 According to the legend, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of King Candaules of Lydia. One day, when he was out tending his sheep, there was a violent earthquake, which broke open the ground to reveal a cavern in which Gyges found a corpse, entombed in a bronze horse, and wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took the ring and wore it to one of the regular meetings that were called to prepare a report to the king on the status of his flocks. Whilst fiddling with the ring Gyges discovered that, if he twisted it so that the stone was turned in towards his palm, it made him invisible. After making this discovery he hatched a plan, and arranged to have himself chosen as one of the messengers sent to report to the king. When he arrived at the palace, he used his new found powers to seduce the king’s wife and, with her help, murder the king and take control of the kingdom. In Glaucon’s telling, the tale of Gyges illustrates the ultimate power and attraction of injustice. Freed from the constraints of custom and reputation, he could steal whatever he wanted, have sex with whomever he chose, kill or free from prison anyone he wished, and not be apprehended. No one, not even the most just, argues Glaucon, could resist the temptation of such a ring. In various ways the papers in this issue can all be connected to the story of Gyges in particular, and to the significance of stories in general in the shaping of moral sensibilities. Myths and stories have always played an essential part in human moral and ethical development—children’s stories, such as Little Red Riding Hood, we know carry strong subliminal moral messages,2 and modern day ethicists still carry on the Socratic/Platonic tradition using Legal Ethics, Volume 10, No. 1

The Impact of Ethical Climates on Changing Legal Landscapes

As we write this editorial, a campaign initiated by the Law Society of England and Wales, and formally launched by the Lord Chancellor Jack Straw, under the banner of “Markets, Justice and Legal Ethics”, is under way with the aim of promoting public understanding of the professional values contained in rule 1 of the revised Solicitors’ Code of Conduct 2007.1 Moreover, debates internal and external to the UK professional bodies are now raising questions about arrangements that have been in place, in some instances, for generations and seemed almost unchangeable given the absence of any moral “tipping point” produced by an event such as Watergate. In England and Wales, following a period of relative quiet, a further review of options for the ethical training of future solicitors has been commissioned in order to inform policy debates within the Law Society.2 The Law Society of Scotland, in its latest consultation paper on education and training, has not only placed professionalism and ethics at the heart of its proposals for the new “PEAT1” and “PEAT2” stages of professional education, but has included knowledge of the profession and its ethics in its proposal for the redefined “Foundation” (academic) stage.3 Legal Ethics, Volume 10, No. 2

Turning the Kaleidoscope: New Visions of Lawyers' Work

How can we best understand and promote integrity, a constant value, within the everchanging context of legal work? Should lawyers, educators and regulators tilt their kaleidoscopes toward the sciences or the humanities in order to grasp the meaning of good lawyering? All of our present contributors are concerned with this basic problem of defining and refining moral standards within legal practice. Two of our lead articles were first presented as papers to the Second International Conference on Lawyers’ Ethics held in Auckland in June 2006 while all three, in different ways, shake up established views and offer colourful new perspectives on what constitutes and supports ethical legal practice.1 Our first article, by Ho, points out that the concept of legal professional privilege is multidimensional and that, depending on whether one’s viewpoint is that of the lawyer or client, the concept can be seen as a duty, a power or a right. Ho argues that we have rather lost the plot with this basic principle of major importance to the administration of justice and that the best way to approach the concept is in terms of “the lawyer’s exemption from compulsory disclosure”. Tracing the historical evolution of the concept, he notes that within the common law world privilege has both expanded and increasingly assumed an elevated, if not exaggerated, status such that today it has virtually become an absolute and fundamental right that unfairly supports the economic self-interest of lawyers. In order to have a better balanced view of the concept Ho argues for its more limited application, suggesting that it be confined to lawyer-client communications made within the context of representation in the legal process. Thus any confidential communications between lawyer and client made outside this limited context should be governed not by an absolute privilege, but by a contextual and less rigid law of confidentiality. While allowing proper recognition of the enduring significance of privilege, this approach, according to Ho, still respects the true purpose and value of the concept through limiting the scope for lawyers to (ab)use it, either as a shield to evade liability or as a means of asserting a dominant position over other providers in the market for legal services.