ABSTRACT
In his 2007 book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, David Luban offered a striking, and some might say unexpected, summation of his scholarship up to that point: ‘on reflection, I have come to recognise that it is precisely concern for human dignity that lies at the bottom of arguments in legal ethics that have occupied me for more than twenty years’.
This chapter seeks to locate Luban’s dignitarian turn both within the wider debate about the nature and function of role morality in professional legal ethics, and in the context of his own writing, particularly his earlier leading work, Lawyers and Justice (1988). By so doing, the chapter seeks to evaluate whether the turn to human dignity constitutes a positive or unhelpful step in finding the ‘ground’ for legal ethics theory. In its final substantive sections, the paper seeks to fill some perceived gaps in Luban’s particular, relational conception of human dignity by reference to the ‘ethics of service’ advanced by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. While Levinas’s work has been largely neglected by philosophical legal ethics, the chapter concludes that it has the potential to strengthen our understanding of lawyerly responsibility by redefining it as the exercise of an ‘office’ of service, built on dignitarian foundations.
