Online | Large-Scale Miscarriages of Justice and the Role of Legal Professionals

Large-Scale Miscarriages of Justice and the Role of Legal Professionals. A Virtue Ethical Perspective

About the online webinar

“No compensation can undo the pain and shame inflicted on me and so many other parents.”

“My life has been ruined, my family's life was almost destroyed, my wife has suffered a devastating and life-changing illness, and my daughter almost died.”

“I do remember driving home at night just beside myself with worry about this money and thinking I could just drive my car into a tree and make it stop.”

These quotes illustrate the devastating consequences of large-scale miscarriages of justice in contemporary Western legal systems. They come from victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the British Post Office scandal, and the Australian Robodebt scandal, which led to widespread debt and bankruptcy, imprisonment, severe poverty, psychological harm, emotional distress, family separations, and, in some instances, even loss of life. In these ‘legal carnages’, legal professionals played a key enabling role, either through indirect or direct active involvement or by turning a blind eye and remaining indifferent to the wrongdoing. Hence, a central question raised by these scandals is: Where were the legal professionals? Should they not have acted differently and done more to protect citizens from these injustices, particularly given their responsibility to uphold the rule of law, justice, liberty, and equality?

This paper uses the lens of virtue ethics to understand the failures of legal professionals in these mass injustices and explores how similar scandals can be prevented in the future. Unlike action-guiding approaches to legal professionalism virtue ethics focuses on the character of legal professionals. It is argued that virtue ethics provides valuable insights into how legal professionals might have fulfilled their role differently if guided by a set of legal professional virtues.

Importantly, these scandals are not incidental anomalies, but manifestations of systematic failures in Western justice systems, affecting large groups of citizens. As such, they also offer valuable lessons for a virtue-ethical approach to legal professionalism, that is, if it is to meaningfully contribute to preventing such miscarriages of justice from recurring. Hence, this paper not only identifies key lessons from virtue ethics, but also formulates a research agenda for a more realistic, citizen-centered virtue ethical approach to legal professionalism, based on insights from these scandals.

About the speakers

Professor Iris van Domselaar holds the chair in Legal Philosophy and Legal Ethics at the Amsterdam Law School and is the founding director of the Amsterdam Centre on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice. She is the director of the Professional Ethics Programme at the Amsterdam Law School, both a bachelor’s and a master’s programme that is committed to the pedagogy of experiential learning in legal ethics education. Her research focuses on how to account for ethical quality in legal practice. Drawing on neo-Aristotelian and neo-Wittgensteinian strands within practical and legal philosophy and on social empirical research, Van Domselaar seeks to come to grips with ethics as ‘lived experience’ on the part of legal professionals and of citizens who are affected by their decisions. She has published extensively on tragic dilemmas and moral remainders in legal practice, legal-professional virtues, the ethics of corporate lawyering, the courage of legal professionals, and moral perception in legal practice. In 2024, she delivered her inaugural lecture ‘Law, ethics, and the cry of Philoctetes. What legal professionals owe to citizens’, in which she provides the building blocks of a citizen-oriented theory of legal ethics. Van Domselaar is a member of the interdisciplinary consortium The Algorithmic Society, where she focuses on digitisation in the justice sector and the implications for the ethics of legal professionals.

Dr Karen Nokes  joined UCL Faculty of Laws as a Lecturer in 2021. She holds a PhD in Business and Management from the University of Manchester, an LLB from the University of Cardiff, and a BSc in psychology from the Open University.

Karen was admitted as Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England & Wales in 1992. Before joining UCL, Karen was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Crime, Justice, and Policing at the University of Birmingham. Prior to postgraduate study, Karen was a solicitor in private practice after which she spent nearly 20 years working for the Law Society/Solicitors Regulation Authority where she held a number of senior posts, including Head of Practice Standards and Director of Supervision. She has extensive experience of legal regulation and of practitioner engagement.

Karen received a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council for her doctoral studies and is currently a grant holder (Co-I) from the ESRC for the project 'Professional Pathologies, Causal Pathways and the Post Office Miscarriages of Justice (PI- Professor Richard Moorhead with Dr Sally Day and Professor Rebecca Helm - Exeter). The Post Office Project (https://postofficeproject.net) explores the critical issues posed by the Horizon IT scandal, the lessons for lawyers’ethics and corporate governance, as well as highlighting lessons for the criminal justice system. 

Honorary Professor Stephen Mayson was originally called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn (of which he is now a Bencher and chairman of its Regulatory Panel). 

After a period as a tax lawyer with a Magic Circle law firm, he developed an international reputation as a strategic advisor in the legal sector, working on a range of strategic, financial, ownership and governance issues with law firms and corporate and government legal departments.  More recently, he has held a number of non-executive directorships and retained strategic advisory relationships with law firms and law-related businesses, and is currently non-executive chairman of an ABS law firm.  

Since 1992, Stephen has also held professorships in the UK and abroad, and is presently Honorary Professor of Law at University College London, attached to the Centres for Ethics & Law and Access to Justice.  He has a particular interest in the regulation of legal services, and conducted an independent review of the regulatory framework in England & Wales from 2018, submitting his main report to the Lord Chancellor in June 2020 (followed in 2022 and 2024 by supplementary reports on consumer harm and the public interest).  He was subsequently appointed by the Lord Chancellor to the expert panel supporting Sir Christopher Bellamy’s review of criminal legal aid, and has recently served on the taskforce established by the Institute of Business Ethics to examine business ethics and the legal profession.

Chair:

Dr Anna Donovan is an Associate Professor of corporate law at UCL Faculty of Laws and is the Director of the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law.   

Anna’s work sits at the intersection of corporate law and behaviour, exploring how institutional rules shape human behaviour across legal fields including corruption, ethics and technology.  Her recent monograph, Reconceptualising Corporate Compliance, was joint runner up for the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and she co-edits Pettet, Lowry and Reisberg’s Company Law. Anna was previously the Vice Dean (Innovation) at the Faculty of Laws. She is a member of the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies and a former panel member of LawtechUK. 

Prior to academia Anna was a corporate solicitor in the City and she is also admitted as an attorney in New York.

About the Centre for Ethics and Law

UCL's Centre for Ethics and Law promotes and enhances collaboration between corporates, practitioners, civil servants, academics and others around the broad themes of professional ethics and the ethics of risk

With its wide range of activities and events the centre creates a leading platform for the exchange of ideas and opportunities to analyse ethical dilemmas from a multi-disciplinary and practice oriented perspective.

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