Iris Van Domselaar

The Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the British Post Office scandal, and the Australian Robodebt scandal led to widespread harm: debt and bankruptcy, imprisonment, severe poverty, health and mental problems, emotional distress, family separations, and, in some instances, even loss of life. In these scandals, legal professionals played a key enabling role, either through direct or indirect involvement. 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, especially given that their professional role is so intimately linked to the ideals of the rule of law, justice, liberty, and equality?This article uses the lens of virtue ethics to understand the failures of legal professionals in these mass injustices and to explore how similar failures can be prevented in the future. However, as these scandals are not isolated anomalies but manifestations of systemic failures in Western justice systems, this article not only distils key lessons from virtue ethics. Grounded in the insights these scandals offer, it also formulates a research agenda for a more realistic, citizen-oriented, virtue-ethical approach to legal professionalism by foregrounding the organisational, digital, and relational dimensions of justice systems.

Richard Abel’s extensive body of work embodies a deep concern for the well-being of the law and a genuine commitment to its underlying values. His paper, ‘Are There Causes and Clients Lawyers Should Not Represent?’, confronts the urgent and troubling reality that lawyers play a crucial role in facilitating the existential crises we are facing: the climate crisis, extreme socio-economic inequality, and the erosion of liberal democracy. The paper can be read as a genuine cri de cœur, calling for an urgent reconsideration of the current role of lawyers.This reply aims to honour Abel’s cri de cœur. However, rather than contributing to the critique of the role of lawyers in the existential crises, it will focus on the implications for philosophical legal ethics. It interprets his argument as offering a compelling reason to adopt a reflective stance on the practice of philosophical legal ethics. Thus, this paper shifts the focus from ‘them,’ the lawyers and regulators, to ‘us,’ the philosophical legal ethicists.

A classic avenue that victims can take to hold a corporation to account and obtain redress for the harms they have suffered is civil litigation. In the past decades, such attempts have been pursued against corporations in the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the asbestos industry or industries working with asbestos and, more recently, the extractive industries. However, it is notoriously difficult for victims whose rights have been violated by corporations to obtain effective redress in civil procedures. A rich body of burgeoning scholarly literature and policy documents has addressed the extent to which systematic and institutional factors are obstacles to victims seeking justice for corporate misconduct. In this article, we will not focus on these systemic and institutional factors but on the role of corporate defence lawyers as their functioning also impacts the capacity of victims of corporate wrongdoing to effectuate their rights. We will address the question of what can be expected from a legal-ethical point of view from corporate defence lawyers advising and representing their corporate clients in large-scale civil liability cases. As a partial answer, we will develop a critique of amoral lawyering as a working philosophy in this context. In addition, we will touch upon the feasibility of a possible alternative.

Moral Quality in Adjudication: On Judicial Virtues and Civic Friendship How best to account for moral quality in adjudication? This article proposes a six-pack of judicial virtues as part of a truly virtue-centred approach to adjudication. These virtues are presented as both constitutive and indispensible for realizing moral quality in adjudication. In addition, it will be argued that in order to honour the inherent relational dimension of adjudication a judge should not only possess these judicial virtues to a sufficient degree, he should also have the attitude of a civic friend. The Aristotelian concept of civic friendship will be proposed as an important complement to a virtue-ethical approach to adjudication.

Inquiry and Imagination in Adjudication. The Case of Digitalisation This comment situates the ideal of adjudication that Del Mar develops in Artefacts of Legal Inquiry within the reality of justice systems being in a ‘sorry state’; courts are generally considered too slow, too expensive and too complicated to provide meaningful access to justice to all citizens.In reaction to this justice gap, one development that is hailed by the access to justice movement is digitalisation. The use of legal technology is promoted for its promise to deliver cheaper, faster, and better justice.As Del Mar’s ideal of adjudication emphasises the value of embodied, collective, imaginative, text-based practices of inquiry among judges and other legal professionals involved, this comment also addresses the question to what extent digitalisation poses a threat to this ideal.Rather than offering a clear-cut answer, this comment is meant as an encouragement to Del Mar and other legal theorists to take heed of the justice gap and digitalisation in the justice system as part and parcel of their theories about adjudication.

ABSTRACTThis article puts judicial perception at the centre of adjudication and of what makes a judge a good judge. It offers a philosophical and empiricist account of judicial perception. Judicial perception is presented as a special ethical, character-dependent skill that a judge needs in order to adequately attend and respond to the cases he is confronted with. In this account ‘thick concepts’ play a vital role. Throughout the text Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act is used as an illustrative source.

Although Nussbaum’s “Capabilities Approach” clearly expresses a commitment to objectivity, this article argues that this commitment is rather ambiguous due to the conception of public reason it endorses. In particular, the CA cannot account for an objective justification of public reason, given certain characteristics of public reason. As a result, the CA jeopardizes the substantive aim it has set itself: to provide an objective justification for public choices regarding human capabilities and their specifications.