Compared to other highly skilled labour markets, the legal profession has been slow to adopt technological changes, but lawyers have been downright speedy compared to courts. Courts already generate voluminous amounts of data, but restrict access to it. The private sector, recognizing how legal data can help its clients, willingly incurs the costs to gather this data and develop proprietary tools to analyze it. As this trend continues, access to justice will worsen, further benefitting wealthier clients over opposing litigants as well as the courts, for no other reason than that courts will lag in their ability to efficaciously decide judicial matters. The judiciary—across all levels—could reverse this trend. The first step is to develop a more robust institutional framework for making court data publicly available. The second step is a willingness among courts to analyze this data when issuing decisions, both procedural and sustantive. Doing so requires courts to develop core competencies in existing and emerging legal technology. Democratizing access to judicial data will diminish the advantage currently enjoyed by affluent litigants, but accrue to the benefit of everyone else—including courts themselves.

The inclusion of a chapter on ethical issues in a property law text is hardly conventional. You will struggle to find matters of professional and legal ethics or ethical duties and obligations discussed in either a text or arguably a course on property law. However, we believe a different way of tackling matters of ethics is required. It remains important to acquire a solid grounding in the legal and regulatory framework relevant to legal ethics, including the sorts of ethical and professional dilemmas confronted by both law students and legal practitioners in a rapidly changing profession. It is also important to gain an understanding of how ethical issues and dilemmas arise in property transactions, dealings and practice.

With the integration of technology into property law and the professional work of property lawyers and conveyancers, the role and context of ethical decision-making is relevant for both the student learning property law and the property law practitioner in the modern period.

This chapter examines the regulation of counsel within international commercial courts, with particular attention given to such courts in Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore. The chapter begins by assessing debate on counsel ethics within international arbitration. Because debate within international arbitration is more developed, it offers a background for identifying challenges endemic to the ethical regulation of transnational lawyering in international commercial courts. The chapter then identifies three regulatory approaches to regulating counsel practising before these courts. It is argued that this diversity affords due space to the distinct institutional structures and needs of the various courts and that it would be imprudent and unnecessary to pursue greater harmonization.

Support for a common cause typically engenders a high degree of collegiality amongst lawyers but, even when united in pursuit of a political goal, closer examination tends to reveal internal divisions along the familiar fault-lines of race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. Reflecting on what Jessie Bernard refers to as the ‘stag effect’ in much of the existing literature on cause lawyers – a disproportionate focus on the activities of men and ‘masculine’ causes – this chapter places a particular spotlight on gender. It draws mainly (though not exclusively) on interviews with female lawyers to explore personal motivation; paradoxical opportunities; the gendered consequences associated with ‘taking on’ legal work; how gender intersects with other variables for women lawyers in such contexts; and the ways in which gender equality is imagined and sometimes manipulated by the state during periods of conflict, authoritarianism and transition. In the final section, we reflect on how the women lawyers we interviewed asserted their agency in the face of significant structural and gendered constraints.

This chapter outlines this book’s contribution toexisting research on the sociology of the legal profession and cause lawyering in particular. It documents how these areas of scholarship have primarily examined the activities of lawyers within democratic states, whereas our focus is on how lawyers as ‘real people’ responded to the professional challenges of practising law in the difficult circumstances of conflict, authoritarianism, and transition. The chapter then provides a detailed account of the methodology and an overview of the empirical data underpinning the study. It concludes with an overview of the remaining chapters, with reference to key themes such as exceptionalism, agency/legitimacy and memory.

Digitalization and the development of automated systems, as well as the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), have radically changed the legal landscape and will continue to impact law at an accelerated pace. These developments have led to the creation of a new industry, legal tech (LT), which aims at creating technological applications specifically tailored for law and the legal market. LT includes a broad range of applications: some of the most prominent and recurrent examples include automation in the drafting of contracts, “mining” case-law, or the creation of smart dispute resolution systems not requiring human intervention. As a result, operations that were previously unthinkable, or that would demand an enormous amount of human resources, can now be readily done through numerous legal services available to lawyers, other professionals, and consumers.1 The rise of LT has brought about various responses, from those who advocate the innovating potential of LT2 to legal traditionalists that consider the replacement of human resources by technology to be highly disruptive.3 In addition, there are those who advocate for a level-headed distinction between “hype” and reality.4 Nonetheless, it would be shortsighted not to see that the advancement of LT is going to have a profound impact on the legal sector, in a degree similar to that which industrialization had on manufacturing.

This chapter is organized under two main sections. The first discusses how the content requirements of HRIAs are conflated with the ethical requirements of the assessment itself. This, narrow and inadequate species of HRIA ethics is quite different from the extensive body of legal ethics. The second section provides a case study of a World Bank-related impact assessment, which gives rise to legal and non-legal ethical issues and which is meant to demonstrate that the absence of concrete human rights-centred ethical guidelines in HRIAs can, even with the best of intentions, lead to outcomes that effectively violate fundamental rights.

The CAVE experience is an immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment employing high-resolution, 3D video and audio technology. Using the CAVE, researchers at University College London designed an IVR scenario intended to echo the logical structure of a traditional ‘trolley scenario’ problem, and deployed this activity within an undergraduate Law and Ethics Course. In this chapter we explore how the use of virtual reality can offer students an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on the dissonance between the behaviour they adopt when faced with an ethical dilemma, and the theoretical stance they propose during class discussion. We explore how this personalisation gives rise to sustained student engagement borne out of a desire to understand the discrepancy between principle and practice. Our chapter considers the potential of IVR technology when teaching ethics to future and current professionals. We conclude by considering how such technology can offer more dynamic opportunities for student reflection and how IVR might be sensibly integrated into a broader legal ethics curriculum.