Professor Richard Moorhead presents paper on Cybernetic Ethics and In-house practice

Professor Richard Moorhead, Chair of Law and Professional Ethics at UCL Faculty of Laws, presented a paper at the 8th International Legal Ethics Conference at Melbourne University, Australia on 7th December.

The paper, titled ‘Pragmatism or Partnerships without Principles? Institutional Logics, GC Ethics and Cybernetic Professionalism’, was part of a panel session on empirical approaches to legal ethics.

In his talk, Professor Moorhead argued that in-house lawyers are a professional hybrid who try to balance commercial, operational and justice concerns. He added that it doesn’t make sense to think of these different areas simply in traditional rule-based or philosophical ways, but rather we need to think about how different parts of the systems that lawyers work within communicate with each other, and how lawyers can influence or manage those systems in ways which honour the central ideas of professionalism.

Read the conference agenda