Introduction
From the point of view of potential members, professions seem to offer unusually stable and orderly career paths.2 The dual promise of education and rewarding work life provides an opportunity to transcend a mundane existence.
As Larson observes, ‘[e]ducation, intelligence, persistent effort and social usefulness appear to grant professionals dignity and the possibility of full human development’.3 In the sociology of professions, the legitimacy of monopoly requires that the opportunity to acquire professional competence and qualification is open to all.4Until recent times, professional ethics had no part in legal education and training in England and Wales, even at the vocational stage. Its exclusion from the initial stage results in part from the historical relationship between the main stakeholders. Pressure has been growing for some time for a different legal education curriculum, and for a role for professional ethics within it. The latest in a long line of reports on the issue, prepared as part of the recent Legal Education and Training Review, leaves open whether and how this will be achieved.
1 T Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Turpin, 5 February 1769, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson 1(24) (JP Boyd (ed), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1950).
2 MS Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: Monopolies of Competence and Sheltered Markets (New Jersey, Transaction Publishers, 2013) at 229.
3 ibid, at 242.
4 ibid, at 51.
II.
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