Values ethics and legal ethics: the QLD and LETR recommendations 6, 7, 10, and 11

The LETR Report recommended increased attention to ethics and values and to critical thinking. These aims could be achieved jointly through teaching ethical thinking: not as theory but as part of developing the capacity for ethical conduct. Such a pedagogy has the potential to become a QLD signature pedagogy supporting "life-narratives" of students. The LETR Report recommends a review of the QLD emphasising legal values and ethics. Concern with values and ethics is linked to concern with professional conduct. Maintaining the law degree as a general or liberal qualification is also strongly desired. These potentially conflicting drivers generate ambivalence towards legal ethics as a subject for study, especially if legal ethics is perceived as teaching the professional codes. Resolution of this tension is achievable through recognising the potential role of ethical teaching as part of an identity apprenticeship. Developing ethical character is as much a liberal as a professional aim. Ethics teaching can play an integrative role in the QLD. Formation of student identity is a central part of Higher Education taking colouration from being situated in legal education. In this context teaching legal ethics becomes the use of a salient example for carrying out the broader project of developing ethical capacity

The path-dependent problem of exporting the rule of law

This article examines three indicators of a functioning rule of law state. First, that the executive operates through legally constituted channels: that administrative and political actions are constrained and channelled through legal authority. Second, that trial processes are robust: being genuine attempts to decide according to proof and law, rather than returning decisions that it is hoped will placate the powerful. Third, that no individual entities, be they corporations or individuals, be they economically or politically or militarily powerful, are able to act outside the reach of legal remedy. The work of D. C. North helps in understanding how the failure to implement or reform law successfully is predictable if the relevant features of the society that receives legal transplant or legal reform efforts are ignored. Ultimately, reform must involve domestic agents in its design and implementation because their knowledge of the subjunctive worlds of their own societies is a vital component in the reform process