ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks specifically to argue for the value of a complexity approach to legal ethics and professional regulation, as well as to make a more general contribution to understanding the complexity of law and regulation. It opens with a broad account of agency as currently represented in legal ethics and then sets out to construct a more adequately complex account of situated and organisationally based agency as (first) a descriptive rather than normative way forward for ethical theory and for regulation. The chapter addresses the way in which notions of agency and entropy do useful explanatory work in understanding the operation of complex systems. Each process is shaped by the particular interplay of organisational and wider environmental effects. These may provide additional resources to the system, or act as a cause of (ethical) entropy. Key environmental forces identified by the cloud shapes are generalised professional norms and regulations, organisational, and personal and wider cultural values.
