Legal Ethics and Regulatory Legitimacy: Regulating Lawyers for Personal Misconduct
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Law societies' regulatory authority to discipline lawyers for personal misconduct is generally accepted. This paper questions this regulatory scope. It suggests that as currently applied, the regulation of personal misconduct is incoherent. It rests on doubtful empirical assumptions about the existence of character and the predictability of human conduct across highly variant circumstances. In exercising this power law societies are engaged in regulatory conduct; they are using the power they are given by the state to curtail the behaviour and interests of some lawyers for the benefit of the reputation of the profession as a whole. Doing so must be justified, and on the two main normative theories of regulatory action - public interest economic and democratic theory - no obvious justification for this regulation arises. Public choice theories provide some insight into why law societies regulate in this way (because they can) but are more a source of illegitimacy than of legitimacy. The paper further argues that the general methodology employed to analyze regulation in this paper is applicable to the question of how regulation of lawyers should be assessed and developed. Regulation of lawyers should be empirically sound; if it rests on empirical claims, those claims must not be doubtful or falsifiable, and if they are, then some other basis for the regulation must be set out. Regulation of lawyers should address the imperfections in the market for legal services and, in particular, the extent to which those imperfections create incentives and opportunities for unethical conduct. Finally, regulation of lawyers should be democratically legitimate. It should be based on more than the claim that the regulation takes place because of the fact of state power, and it should be directed at fostering the proper performance of the important role that lawyers play in the functioning of the democratic legal system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.042 | 0.109 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".