Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, has called for greater prominence for ethics in legal training on university courses and on professional training courses.
Giving the Lord Slynn Memorial Lecture 2016 in London last week, Lord Neuberger said: “One of the downsides of relatively high profile regulation is that it can easily lead to an attractive culture which effectively takes high ethical standards for granted being replaced by a box-ticking approach, in which, provided she can comply with relatively inflexible rules, an advocate feels free to do whatever she likes.
“Professional ethics cannot always be reduced to simple rules, and if that leads regulators to produce increasingly complex and detailed rules, I wonder whether we are better off as a result.”
