Legal Ethics

Legal Ethics - Open session

This session examines legal ethics as a socially situated practice, foregrounding comparative perspectives. Rather than treating ethics as a fixed set of professional rules, we invite contributions that analyse how lawyers, judges, paralegals, and allied legal actors negotiate ethical dilemmas within different legal orders.

We particularly welcome empirical, historical, and theoretical papers from and about the Global South that address questions such as: How do colonial legacies and ongoing transnational governance shape norms of professional responsibility? In what ways do class, race, caste, gender, and indigeneity structure who is protected or disciplined by ethical codes? How are ethical claims mobilised in struggles over human rights, environmental justice, migration, and digital surveillance? And how do South–South comparisons unsettle dominant, Global North–centric models of legal professionalism?

By placing these debates in comparative perspective—across countries, regions, and legal traditions—the session aims to decenter universalist understandings of legal ethics and to explore alternative normative frameworks. The session seeks to foster dialogue among scholars working in diverse contexts and methodologies.