Synopsis
No compensation can undo the pain and shame inflicted on me and so many other parents. My life has been ruined, my family's life was almost destroyed, my wife has suffered a devastating and life-changing illness, and my daughter almost died. I do remember driving home at night just beside myself with worry about this money and thinking I could just drive my car into a tree and make it stop. These quotes illustrate the devastating consequences of large-scale miscarriages of justice in contemporary Western legal systems. They come from victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the British Post Office scandal, and the Australian Robodebt scandal, which led to widespread debt and bankruptcy, severe poverty, psychological harm, emotional distress, family separations, and, in some instances, even loss of life. In these ‘legal carnages’, legal professionals played a key enabling role, either through indirect or direct active involvement or by turning a blind eye and remaining indifferent to the wrongdoing. Hence, a central question raised by these scandals is: Where were the legal professionals? Should they not have acted differently and done more to protect citizens from these injustices, particularly given their responsibility to uphold the rule of law, justice, liberty, and equality?
This paper uses the lens of virtue ethics to understand the failures of legal professionals in these mass injustices and explores how similar scandals can be prevented in the future. Unlike ‘outside-in’, action-guiding approaches to legal professionalism, virtue ethics - ‘an inside-out’, agent-based approach - focuses on the character of legal professionals rather than merely on their decisions in well-defined choice situations. It is argued that virtue ethics provides valuable insights into how legal professionals might have fulfilled their role differently if guided by a set of legal professional virtues. Importantly, these scandals are not incidental anomalies, but extreme manifestations of systematic failures in Western justice systems, affecting large groups of citizens. As such, they also offer valuable lessons for a virtue-ethical approach to legal professionalism, that is, if it is to meaningfully contribute to preventing such miscarriages of justice from recurring. Hence, this paper not only identifies key lessons from virtue ethics, but also formulates a research agenda for a more realistic, citizen-centered virtue ethical approach to legal professionalism, based on insights from these scandals.
Speaker
Iris van Domselaar holds a chair in Legal Philosophy and Legal Ethics at the Amsterdam Law School and is founding director of the Amsterdam Centre on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice. She is director of the Professional Ethics Programme at the Amsterdam Law School, a bachelor’s and master’s programme that is committed to the pedagogy of experiential learning in legal ethics education. Van Domselaar is also editor-in-chief of the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy. Her research focuses on how to account for ethical quality in legal practice. Drawing on neo-Aristotelian and neo-Wittgensteinian strands within practical and legal philosophy and on social empirical research, Van Domselaar seeks to come to grips with ethics as ‘lived experience’ on the part of legal professionals and of citizens who are involved in legal procedures. She has published extensively on topics such as tragic dilemmas in legal practice, judicial virtues, the ethics of corporate lawyering, courage of legal professionals, and moral perception in legal practice. Van Domselaar is a member of the interdisciplinary consortium The Algorithmic Society, where she focuses on digitisation in the justice sector and the implications for the ethics of legal professionals.