Publisher's Synopsis
The second edition of this path-breaking text successfully maps the complex regulatory environment in which the legal profession in England and Wales now operates. It opens with a critical overview of professional ideals, organisation, power and culture and an examination of the mechanisms of professions, exercised through governance, regulation, discipline and education. The core of the book explores the conflict between duties owed to clients (diligence and confidentiality) and wider duties (to the profession, third parties and society). The final part applies lawyers' ethics to dispute settlement (litigation, negotiation, advocacy and alternative dispute settlement). The second edition incorporates the considerable changes to the law, codes and the policies of government occurring since the first edition. Once again, the authors seek the guiding principles against which the suitability and efficacy of long-standing principles should be judged, asking whether the professions are suitably regulated in an era of sustained and continuous change. From the reviews of the First Edition: 'The publication of this book should put to rest any future controversy about whether legal ethics is a deserving topic of academic research and whether it should be taught in law faculties. The answer that Boon and Levin give is a resounding and uncompromising YES...The Ethics and Conduct of Lawyers in England and Wales is a book that should take pride of place on the bookshelves of any self-respecting lawyer or academic...quite simply an exemplary and superior piece of legal scholarship that merits attention by anyone who is interested in the workings of the legal profession and the development of law which of course, should mean everyone. Allan C Hutchinson, Journal of Law and Society '...the most scholarly and detailed of its kind'. Michael Beloff QC, Times Higher Education Supplement 'A significant book that meets a current need in those law schools which have already accepted that the ethics and conduct of lawyers in England and Wales quite properly has a place in Legal Education.' Richard Tur, The Law Quarterly Review
