Toward a Restorative Approach to Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between legal ethics and restorative justice. It is commonly observed that there exists a "decline" in professionalism among Canadian lawyers today. One of the persistent concerns is that legal ethics rules and the "standard conception" of professional role morality that underpins them, the neutral partisan, fail to strike the correct balance between client interests and the public interest. Building on this idea, this article argues that the legal profession should be reoriented around restorative justice as the moral foundation of a more progressive approach to legal ethics and professional responsibility. It translates concepts from restorative justice into ethical terms, grounding ideas about interdependence, community involvement, and public accountability into a list of restorative principles that can be readily applied by lawyers, firms, and other kinds of law practices. The article concludes by recommending a series of lawyering practices and professional regulatory measures that are consistent with taking a restorative principles-based approach. Ultimately, the article shows that restorative justice offers more than an alternative path for lawyers in criminal law settings. It constitutes a distinct set of obligations that, once implemented as legal ethics, has the potential to raise the moral consciousness of lawyers, facilitate collaboration within communities and across systems, and redefine the role of lawyers in the administration of justice, transforming conditions of law and society in a more equitable direction.

Keywords: Legal Ethics, Professional Responsibility, Restorative Justice, Relational Theory, Restorative Practices, Substantive Equality