Tending the Bar: The Good Character Requirement for Law Society Admission
Every Canadian law society requires that applicants for bar admission be of “good character. ”The author assesses the administration of this requirement and its stated purposes of ensuring ethical conduct by lawyers, protecting the public and maintaining the profession’s reputation. In particular, the premise underlying the use of the good character requirement to fulfill those purposes - that character is the “well-spring of professional conduct in lawyers” - is subjected to critical examination through the theoretical principles of Aristotelian virtue ethics and the empirical evidence of social psychology. The primary thesis of this paper is that as currently justified, administered and applied the good character requirement cannot be defended and must not be maintained. The secondary thesis of the paper, however, is that given the relationship - albeit a qualified one - between character and ethical conduct, a reformed version of the good character requirement can, and arguably should, be maintained by the provincial law societies.
Integrity in Zealousness: Comparing the Standard Conceptions of the Canadian and American Lawyer
Since the late 1970s American law journals have published literally thousands of articles on the problem of lawyers’ ethics. In these articles American scholars lament the current state of the legal profession and suggest that something has gone seriously wrong with legal practice and with the way lawyers conceive the ideals and norms of that practice. A few defenders of current ethical standards remain, but the dominant tone of current scholarship is highly critical of lawyers’ seeming ability to remove their “professional” actions from the scrutiny of basic precepts of ordinary morality. In contrast with this American proliferation of critical perspectives on legal ethics, little Canadian scholarship on the subject of lawyers’ ethics exists; as Gavin MacKenzie put it in his 1993 guide to lawyers’ professional responsibility and discipline, Canadian literature on legal ethics is “embarrassingly sparse”. A few American articles on legal ethics have been published in Canadian
Swiss Press Law
In Switzerland, as in other free, Western democracies, the legal status of all press matters is rooted in the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the Press: Article 55 of the Swiss Constitution expresses the idea concisely as follows: The freedom of the Press is guaranteed. On the one hand, this article guarantees every individual citizen freedom of expression in an atmosphere free from state interference. Freedom of the Press enables individual citizens to express political convictions because it grants the political right to freedom by which the self-determination of the individual is guaranteed; in this manner, it empowers a direct democracy to function, since this is only possible in a state in wich freedom of discussion is acknowledged. ,