Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This webinar on 'Large-Scale Miscarriages of Justice and the Role of Legal Professionals. A Virtue Ethical Perspective' which took place on Wednesday 18 June 2025 was organised by the Centre of Ethics and Law.
Speakers:
- Professor Iris van Domselaar
- Dr Karen Nokes
- Honorary Professor Stephen Mayson
Chair: Dr Anna Donovan
About the Webinar
“No compensation can undo the pain and shame inflicted on me and so many other parents.”
“My life has been ruined, my family's life was almost destroyed, my wife has suffered a devastating and life-changing illness, and my daughter almost died.”
“I do remember driving home at night just beside myself with worry about this money and thinking I could just drive my car into a tree and make it stop.”
These quotes illustrate the devastating consequences of large-scale miscarriages of justice in contemporary Western legal systems. They come from victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the British Post Office scandal, and the Australian Robodebt scandal, which led to widespread debt and bankruptcy, imprisonment, severe poverty, psychological harm, emotional distress, family separations, and, in some instances, even loss of life. In these ‘legal carnages’, legal professionals played a key enabling role, either through indirect or direct active involvement or by turning a blind eye and remaining indifferent to the wrongdoing. Hence, a central question raised by these scandals is: Where were the legal professionals? Should they not have acted differently and done more to protect citizens from these injustices, particularly given their responsibility to uphold the rule of law, justice, liberty, and equality?
This paper uses the lens of virtue ethics to understand the failures of legal professionals in these mass injustices and explores how similar scandals can be prevented in the future. Unlike action-guiding approaches to legal professionalism virtue ethics focuses on the character of legal professionals. It is argued that virtue ethics provides valuable insights into how legal professionals might have fulfilled their role differently if guided by a set of legal professional virtues.
Importantly, these scandals are not incidental anomalies, but manifestations of systematic failures in Western justice systems, affecting large groups of citizens. As such, they also offer valuable lessons for a virtue-ethical approach to legal professionalism, that is, if it is to meaningfully contribute to preventing such miscarriages of justice from recurring. Hence, this paper not only identifies key lessons from virtue ethics, but also formulates a research agenda for a more realistic, citizen-centered virtue ethical approach to legal professionalism, based on insights from these scandals.
This webinar on 'Large-Scale Miscarriages of Justice and the Role of Legal Professionals. A Virtue Ethical Perspective' which took place on Wednesday 18 June 2025 was organised by the Centre of Ethics and Law.
Speakers:
- Professor Iris van Domselaar
- Dr Karen Nokes
- Honorary Professor Stephen Mayson
Chair: Dr Anna Donovan
About the Webinar
“No compensation can undo the pain and shame inflicted on me and so many other parents.”
“My life has been ruined, my family's life was almost destroyed, my wife has suffered a devastating and life-changing illness, and my daughter almost died.”
“I do remember driving home at night just beside myself with worry about this money and thinking I could just drive my car into a tree and make it stop.”
These quotes illustrate the devastating consequences of large-scale miscarriages of justice in contemporary Western legal systems. They come from victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal, the British Post Office scandal, and the Australian Robodebt scandal, which led to widespread debt and bankruptcy, imprisonment, severe poverty, psychological harm, emotional distress, family separations, and, in some instances, even loss of life. In these ‘legal carnages’, legal professionals played a key enabling role, either through indirect or direct active involvement or by turning a blind eye and remaining indifferent to the wrongdoing. Hence, a central question raised by these scandals is: Where were the legal professionals? Should they not have acted differently and done more to protect citizens from these injustices, particularly given their responsibility to uphold the rule of law, justice, liberty, and equality?
This paper uses the lens of virtue ethics to understand the failures of legal professionals in these mass injustices and explores how similar scandals can be prevented in the future. Unlike action-guiding approaches to legal professionalism virtue ethics focuses on the character of legal professionals. It is argued that virtue ethics provides valuable insights into how legal professionals might have fulfilled their role differently if guided by a set of legal professional virtues.
Importantly, these scandals are not incidental anomalies, but manifestations of systematic failures in Western justice systems, affecting large groups of citizens. As such, they also offer valuable lessons for a virtue-ethical approach to legal professionalism, that is, if it is to meaningfully contribute to preventing such miscarriages of justice from recurring. Hence, this paper not only identifies key lessons from virtue ethics, but also formulates a research agenda for a more realistic, citizen-centered virtue ethical approach to legal professionalism, based on insights from these scandals.
