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17 Legal Ethics [i] (2014)

handle is hein.journals/lethics17 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial The general issues of Legal Ethics have recently been demonstrating how a field dedicated to evaluating the behaviour of lawyers and of professional institutions can carry such impor- tant disciplinary breadth. This issue continues in that vein, although all but the first also have some focus on the context of legal practice in the Asia-Pacific. Professor Alice Woolley begins the issue with an intriguing shift in focus for the applied moral philosophy relating to lawyers. Turning from moral theory's usual emphasis on the problems of role morality-and especially on the collision of moral norms and role- directed behaviour-Woolley asks whether being a lawyer affects the individual's ability to live a meaningful life. It is not only the moral aspects and collisions inherent in the lawyer's role that bear on the possibility of a meaningful life-it can be affected by the different contexts of legal practice. Professor Woolley argues for a more serious account of the place of both meaning and context in the theory of lawyers' ethics. The next article turns to the effectiveness of professional regulation, and the poten- tial role of lawyers in self-policing professional standards through an obligation to report misconduct. Professor Gino Dal Pont considers the position in Australia where, somewhat distinctively, there are very few obligations on lawyers to report the misconduct of other lawyers. Dal Pont thinks that self-policing can be a means of reinforcing ethical cohesion in the profession, but has significant concerns about a broad reporting obligation for lawyers and its potential misuse. He is adamant that the threshold should be high, and the condi- tions requiring a report should be clear, before the reporting obligation should arise. Associate Professor Nina Jorgensen considers the independence of criminal defence lawyers in China-and that is both their independence from the state and their independ- ence from their clients. She draws some uncomfortable analogies with Nazi Germany, South Africa in the apartheid era, and the Soviet Union in assessing Chinese lawyers' lack of independence from the state. This is naturally pushing lawyers in opposite direc- tions-towards strident human rights advocacy on the one hand, or away from criminal law practice altogether on the other. Jorgensen thinks that, if lawyers were assured a greater degree of independence from government, the Chinese state, ironically, could itself benefit from the release that this would give to some suppressed community anger. In any case, she thinks that the present position of state dependence is not institutionally self-sustaining. Associate Professor Seow Hon Tan brings us to ethics education, and the experience of law students in Singapore when on placements as interns in law firms. She emphasises the impact that the internships had on students' sense of accountability and responsibility, the students' ideals, what they thought about the lawyers they worked for, and what they considered to be important professional traits. Identifying that the students exhibited a high degree of awareness about legal work, Associate Professor Tan was impressed by how well they appreciated the connection between professional experiences and their own personali- ties and character. She concludes with a hope that this should lead to stronger self-reflection

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