Canadian Legal Ethics: Ready for the Twenty-First Century at Last

Abstract

This article analyzes the transformation in the scholarship of legal ethics that has occurred in Canada over the last decade and maps out an agenda for future research. The author attributes the recent growth of Canadian legal ethics as an academic discipline to a number of interacting factors: a response to external pressures, initiatives within the legal profession, changes in Canadian legal education and the emergence of a new cadre of legal ethics scholars. This article chronicles the public history of legal ethics in Canada over the last decade and analyzes the first and second wave of scholarship in the area. It integrates such developments within broader changes in legal education that set the stage for the continued expansion of Canadian legal ethics in the Twenty-First century.

Keywords: legal ethics, legal profession, canada, legal scholarship, professional responsibility, ethical lawyering, ethics, Canadian legal ethics, comparative legal ethics