730-454 Legal Ethics

Students who have completed 730-112, 730-410, 730-383 or 730-455 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Legal Method and Reasoning; Principles of Public Law; Torts; Dispute Resolution; Obligations or in each case their equivalents.

NOTE: For Graduate LLB students (three-year program) Torts will be a corequisite. The Obligations prerequsite will be waived.

Legal Ethics is a practical and critical introduction to ethical decision-making for lawyers. The subject has two main components. Firstly, it introduces different moral approaches to legal ethics, focusing on the justifications for and criticisms of the traditional adversarial advocate approach and alternatives to it. Students will be expected to be able to apply the different moral approaches to fact scenarios and to be able to articulate and explain which approach/es they find most convincing for each scenario and why. Secondly, the course examines the way that lawyers' ethics and conduct are regulated including the co-regulatory disciplinary process, the professional conduct standards that regulate lawyers including those relating to conflicts of interest, confidentiality and duties owed to the court and the general law of lawyering, including obligations in equity, contract and tort as well as procedural obligations in litigation. Students will be expected to be able to identify and resolve ethical issues that arise in legal practice using the professional conduct rules and law of lawyering. Students will also be expected to be able to critically assess the way lawyers' ethics are regulated by these rules against different moral approaches to legal ethics. Finally, the principles of trust accounting are taught and assessed as part of this course.

Ethics Exercise 2000 words 40% (due week 6) and a take-home examination of 3000 words 60% (to be held over five days in week 10 of semester). Students will be required to complete a 1.5 hour open-book Trust Accounting Examination. This will be marked on a pass/fail basis.

Printed materials will be issued by the Faculty of Law