Parker and Evans's Inside Lawyers' Ethics

This chapter considers how the structure and processes of the regulatory systems that govern the legal profession are relevant to lawyers’ ethics and behaviour – that is, the significance of institutions for lawyers’ ethics. In this chapter we consider ways in which the ethics demonstrated by the legal profession as a whole are likely to affect lawyers’ individual and personal ethics. We begin by discussing how our current approaches to regulating the legal profession might, or might not, embody and engender the values that should characterise legal practice. We then focus on the ‘law of lawyering’ – rules and regulatory regimes that have been created to apply specifically to lawyers under the legislation and case law governing the legal professions of each of the States and Territories. The next section provides a brief history of the development of Australian legal professional regulation, before contrasting this with a different regulatory approach that sees market competition as the fairest and most efficient form of professional regulation.