There is a growing body of normative literature about the ethical deliberation of lawyers, including how the personal values of lawyers should or should not influence their ethical decision making in legal practice. A significant amount of this literature (both scholarly and popular) has been written from a Christian perspective, dealing with how lawyers of the Christian faith ought to reconcile their personal values with their professional role. Linked to this is a growing body of empirical research about lawyers’ ethical deliberations in practice.
This presentation will explore some of the key themes from the body of normative literature, and will then consider the responses of a group of Christian lawyers about how they negotiate between the ethical worlds of faith and legal practice, and their views about some of the key themes from the normative literature. These responses have been obtained as a part of ongoing Doctoral research which aims to examine and assess how the personal values of lawyers of the Christian faith affect their ethical decision making in legal practice.