ABSTRACT
There has been a noticeable burst of energy recently among the legal professions of England and Wales to develop legal ethics education. The leaders of the Bar Council and the Law Society, the representative bodies of both the Bar and the solicitors’ profession respectively, have become actively interested in ethics education. They have, in many instances, framed it as essential to the survival of the profession, as a cure-all to the threats (internal and external) to public confidence and trust, to the profession’s distinctive identity, and therefore to its special place in society.1 In the current (post-Clementi, post-Legal Services Act 2007) climate, the professions’ regulatory bodies, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) and the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA), are subjecting the professions to more managerial activity than ever before. Part of this activity involves a keener interest in means by which to assess and certify the professional standards and ethical qualities of their members. They have struggled thus far to devise robust assessment strategies, and have sought the consultation of academics on how to proceed. There is, however, strikingly little guidance emerging from the legal academic context.
