A Healthy Disrespect for the Law: The 2025 Mawhinney Lecture in Professional Ethics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/alr2883Abstract
This article contends that lawyers should cultivate a healthy level of disrespect for the law. Professional ethics codes place the notion of respect for the law at the core of legal identity. However, this reverence serves to suppress moral outrage and shields systemic injustice from critique. This article challenges the assumption that lawyers and law students owe respect to the law in a traditional sense, and argues that suspicion of the law is a more appropriate starting point given historical and ongoing inequality. Disrespect, when principled and proportionate, can advance justice, and it is justice, rather than fidelity to law, that should guide the legal profession.
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