Ethics in legal practice

This unit provides a practical and critical introduction to ethical decision-making and the law and codes of professional responsibility in lawyering. It introduces different moral approaches to legal practice, focusing on the justifications for and criticisms of the traditional adversarial advocate approach and alternatives to it in the context of different areas of practice. You will be encouraged to develop awareness of your own ethical orientation and expected to be able to apply different ethical approaches to hypothetical scenarios. This unit examines the way that lawyers' ethics and conduct are regulatedand set out in legal principles and codes. You will be expected to be able to identify and resolve ethical issues that arise in legal practice using the professional conduct rules and law of lawyering. You will also be expected to be able to critically assess the way lawyers' ethics are regulated by these rules against different ethical approaches to legal ethics and in different practice contexts.