Foreword

• Author: H.W. Arthurs
• Profession: Osgoode Hall Law School York University
• Pages: 11-15

xi

FOREWORD

To the First Edition

What a twist of fate! No sooner do I appear in print deploring the lack

of ref‌lective and critical Canadian scholarship in the f‌ield of legal eth-

ics1 than I am asked to write an introduction to just such a book on

that very subject. Not that I ought to have been surprised. Allan Hut-

chinson’s enquiring mind and encyclopedic interests have taken him

across a wide spectrum of legal subjects. He has written in a variety of

styles and for academic, professional, and lay readers; and he is virtu-

ally incapable of writing something that is not ref‌lective and critical. I

would have predicted, however, that in turning his attention to legal

ethics and professional conduct, he just might have tackled one subject

too many. But I would have been wrong.

This f‌ield is a particularly daunting one for any serious scholar:

in fact, when it comes to legal ethics, the more serious the scholar,

the more daunted she or he might be. After all, scholars need a body

of materials to work with, but in Canada at least, decisional material,

commentary, and sociological analysis are all in scarce supply in this

f‌ield. Take the Canadian Bar Association’s Code of Professional Con-

duct as a case in point. Although this was supposedly the template

for professional discipline across the country, for f‌ifty years after its

adoption in 1920, the CBA code was a well-kept secret—never liti-

gated, virtually unremarked upon in the secondary literature, already

obsolete at its inception, and positively anachroni stic by the time it was

1“Why Canadi an Law Schools Do Not Teach Legal Eth ics” in K. Economides,

ed., Ethical Challenges to Legal Education an d Conduct (Oxford: Hart Publish ing,

1998) 105.