Vaughan, Steven;
Nokes, Karen;
(2025)
Role morality in action? An empirical exploration of the professional ethics of practising environmental lawyers.
Legal Ethics
10.1080/1460728x.2025.2489201.
(In press).
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Abstract
This article examines the professional ethics of environmentallawyers. Drawing on a survey of 126 and 39 interviews, we findthat when it comes to attitudes towards legality in general andlegality in hierarchical professional contexts, environmentallawyers seem to share the attitudes of other lawyers, as describedby previous research. However, environmental lawyers otherwisedemonstrated an approach to ethical choices that wasremarkable in two ways. First, a notably high proportionexpressed a willingness to exploit legal uncertainty for the benefitof clients, even where doing so would override countervailingethical considerations. Second, while respondents spoke toenvironmental commitments in their personal lives – in choosingtheir career, in choices regarding consumption and privatelifestyle – environmental considerations were muted inexplanations of legal-ethical choices, even where these choiceshad evident downstream environmental impacts. We suggest thatenvironmental lawyers may demonstrate here the ‘role morality’(a potential disjunct between private and professional moralities)that scholars have found at play in other parts of the profession.We also reflect on whether these lawyers’ pervasive exposure tolegal uncertainty in the polycentric context of environmental law,combined with a misconceived (legally incorrect) client-primacyapproach to lawyering, may account for their distinctive approach.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Role morality in action? An empirical exploration of the professional ethics of practising environmental lawyers |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/1460728x.2025.2489201 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/1460728x.2025.2489201 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on whichthis article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Environmental law, lawyers’ ethics, role morality, legal uncertainty |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207096 |
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