Do Codes of Ethics Actually Shape Legal Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In theory, professional codes of conduct are supposed to assist lawyers in choosing the appropriate course of action when they are faced with an ethical dilemma and it is expected that lawyers will, in practice, turn to such codes for guidance. A recent research initiative undertaken by legal scholars at the University of Western Ontario sought to examine the effectiveness of codes of ethics in maintaining standards of behaviour within the legal profession in Ontario by examining the kinds of ethical problems confronting lawyers in that province and the extent to which they were resolved through the use of professional codes.This article examines the nature of ethical codes in the legal profession and offers an analysis of particular results of the research initiative. The authors conclude that the research demonstrates a lack of reliance on professional codes for the purpose of resolving ethical issues by the majority of lawyers practicing in Ontario. Moreover, the study revealed that such codes tend to inhibit ethical deliberation by those lawyers who refer to them for assistance in solving specific problems. The results of the study will, in the authors' opinion, encourage the legal profession in Ontario to re-examine the efficacy of existing codes of professional conduct and the role they should play in shaping lawyers' ethical decision-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".