Library of Essays on Legal Ethics and the Enforcement of Law – serie

Governments often act in the name of security to protect their citizenries. For example by legislation or by the recruitment and employment of large numbers of armed personnel to detect and prosecute violent crime, or via engagements in military interventions to repel or pre-empt foreign attacks. These practices are often taken to have strong moral justifications. The value of security is linked to the value of life and the disvalue of violence and injury, and all of these are central both to theoretical accounts of and common sense views about the difference between right and wrong. The essays in this volume seek to increase our understanding of state action in the name of security and take a range of viewpoints and approaches. Some articles attempt to delimit the concept of security, or dispute attempted delimitations; some consider security as a 'good' and ask what sort of good it is, and how valuable; whilst others consider the relation between state action in the name of security and state action in the name of other goods, notably liberty, or consider ethical issues in health security, climate security and cybersecurity. Overall, this collection of essays shows how appeals by governments to the value of security have grown out of relatively recent events and processes at a global level, such as the response to pandemics, the acceleration of climate change, and counter-terrorism. The volume features an introductory essay and forms part of a five-volume series on legal ethics and the enforcement of law.

This new collection is a contribution to the literature on police ethics, specifically the philosophical literature on ethical issues that arise in police enforcement of the law.

Judicial ethics is a surprisingly underexplored area and this volume marks an important point in this relatively new but commendably growing field of studies. The areas covered range from the metaethics of decision and how this impacts the judiciary to the ethical evaluation of the substance and procedure of a decision and codes of judicial conduct. Addressing each of these meanings and more, this collection brings together for the first time many, if not most, of the ’canons’ (or soon-to-be ’canons’) of modern judicial ethics scholarship. The previously published articles have created new interdisciplinary, historical, cultural and doctrinal understandings of judicial character, conduct, regulation and development, and bringing them together in one volume provides readers with the opportunity to review the field more readily and comprehensively.

This collection contains the very best writing on lawyers’ ethics. Timeless and provocative, the essays explore the moral foundations of the lawyer’s role as well as the personal and professional dilemmas lawyers face in the practice of law. What does it mean to be a good lawyer? How does a lawyer navigate the inevitable tension between moral principles and professional responsibilities? The collection brings together previously published articles alongside a specially commissioned introduction by the volume editors which provides an overview of the articles and themes in the collection. This volume is of interest to teachers and scholars of legal ethics, and undergraduate and graduate students of law.