The Hamlyn Lectures 2024 - Frail Professionalism: Lawyers Ethics after the Post Office and other cases
Wed 6 Nov 2024 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Moot Court, Liberty Buiding, LS3 1DB
Description
The 2024 Hamlyn lectures will be delivered by Professor Richard Moorhead, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at the University of Exeter.
The Post Office Scandal has alerted the nation to trouble in the legal world and the profession to problems in its ranks.
To those more accustomed to looking at lawyers’ ethics, the problems are less surprising. They suggest bad decisions of course, taken by bad people sometimes, but also bad systems and cultures too. The consequences of the Scandal were unparalleled for those who owned and worked in Post Offices and their families, but the problems that were exposed with the lawyers were unsurprising, ugly manifestations of a certain kind of professional orthodoxy. We see a clue about how important those problems are in the way they spread so widely across all segments of the legal professions, junior and senior lawyers, in-house and independent practice, barristers and solicitors.
These lectures will argue it is time to change the way lawyers think and behave, and how courts, clients, and regulators set their expectations. As well as fair and rigorous enforcement, the intellectual frameworks of lawyers need refreshing, and the institutions they work within strengthening.
Lecture 2: Can legal logics pollute institutions? Extraordinary Orthodoxies and Legality Illusions.
This lecture shifts the focus from the individual to their institutional contexts. Lawyers operate in organisations and within courts, nurtured by the cultures of litigation that can reinforce each other's vulnerabilities, giving rise to ‘extraordinary orthodoxies’ that can pollute sensible and just decision-making, driving cover-ups and false narratives. Such orthodoxies are morally loaded and pathologically tactical; they may explain many of the actions of lawyers in the Post Office Scandals and other cases. The idea that these orthodoxies culminate in the creation of legality illusions will be developed to illustrate the need for a richer but simpler, socially meaningful notion of professional ethics that can have practical traction.
For information on the other 2024 Hamlyn Lectures, please click here.
Location
Moot Court, Liberty Buiding, LS3 1DB