ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to contextualise the volume by providing a review of the main strands in legal ethics scholarship in (chiefly) the common law world since the late 1970s. It focuses particularly on philosophical legal ethics, which is the subject of Part I of this volume, identifying (following Luban and Wendel) two dominant waves of scholarship treating legal ethics as a subset, firstly, of moral philosophy, and secondly, signalling a ‘jurisprudential turn’ in thinking about legal ethics, as a subset of legal and political theory. It compares these approaches with an established strand of empirical and socio-legal scholarship, which it sees as coalescing into a third organisational and behavioural wave that seeks to take more seriously lawyers’ field location, organisational values/logics and situational pressures as a significant source of and challenge for legal ethics. It summarises and locates the individual contributions to the book in relation to these waves and identifies some future developments and issues for the field.
