The Legal Professions Research Network and Asian Law Centre at Melbourne Law School are delighted to be hosting the Eighth International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) and look forward to welcoming you to Melbourne in December 2018.
The eighth biennial ILEC takes place at a fascinating time in the evolution of legal ethics, as the disruptive innovation of legal services creates ongoing challenges and perhaps opportunities for ethics and professional regulation, both locally and trans-nationally. The continuing growth of Asia’s influence as an economic force, which has instigated the discourse of the ‘Asian Century’, arguably signals profound cultural, economic and legal transformations globally, and adds a further and so far under-developed, dimension to debates regarding the future(s) of legal ethics.
From modest beginnings in 2004, ILEC has become the premier international conference on legal ethics, and the flagship event of the International Association of Legal Ethics. The conference attracts a large international audience including scholars from a variety of disciplines, legal practitioners, judges and professional regulators from developed and emerging jurisdictions. The atmosphere of the conference is open and inclusive, with presentations organised into thematic panels across multiple streams.
Participants may also wish to note that ILEC VIII dovetails with three other significant conferences in Australia:
- the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education Conference will also be in Melbourne, hosted by Monash University Faculty of Law, 28-30 November 2018
- the Global Legal Skills Conference 13 (GLS-13) sponsored by Melbourne Law School and the John Marshall Law School, Chicago, will also take place at Melbourne Law School from 10-12 December 2018
- the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Conference will be hosted by Wollongong Law School, New South Wales, December 12-15, 2018
Please note conference registration has now closed.
The First International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC 1), was held at Exeter University in July 2004, and took as its theme New Perspectives on Professionalism: Educating and Regulating Lawyers for the 21st Century. The conference was hosted and organised by Professors Kim Economides and Julian Webb, as Founding Editors of the journal Legal Ethics, who felt that more needed to be done, particularly in Europe, to develop a growing international community of legal ethics. About 40 delegates attended, mostly from the Antipodes, North America, and the UK. Delegates heard a keynote address from Professor Robert Gordon of Yale, and engaged in a range of panel sessions over two days. Although numbers were modest, the interest and quality of discussion was sufficiently high that it was decided to meet biennially and institute the ILEC series.
ILEC 2, with roughly double the numbers attending ILEC 1, was organised by Professor Tim Dare in Auckland, New Zealand, in June 2006. Taking as its theme Professional Ethics and Personal Integrity, Professor William Simon of Columbia was the keynote speaker. ILEC 3, co-hosted by the law schools at Griffith University and the University of Queensland, met in July 2008 on the Australian Gold Coast. This time numbers more than quadrupled from ILEC 1, with delegates coming from a much wider geographical base, though still underrepresented from Asian, African and Latin American countries.
ILEC 3 chose as its theme Integrity in Legal Practice and actively incorporated into the program judges, legal practitioners, regulators and policymakers whilst bringing together eminent US and Australian keynote speakers. ILEC 3 was a significant milestone that gave invaluable momentum and publicity to the ILEC series.
Under the leadership of Professor Deborah Rhode and our Stanford hosts, ILEC made its first visit to North America in July 2010. ILEC 4 gave yet further impetus to this fledgling international movement by hosting the launch of the International Association of Legal Ethics (IAOLE) and bringing together around 170 legal ethicists from around the globe to hear papers presented in over 40 panel sessions.
In July 2012, ILEC 5 met in Canada for the first time, in the mountainous setting of Banff, Alberta, where the conference was co-hosted by the University of Calgary and Dalhousie University. This meeting attracted over 200 participants from around 20 different countries and confirmed the study of legal ethics as a global movement, now regularly bringing together not only legal scholars but also judges, legal regulators and practitioners.
In July 2014, ten years after ILEC 1, ILEC 6 returned to the UK to meet at City University Law School in London. Numbers had grown considerably and this time there were over 230 participants with 140 presentations covering new themes such as the impact of technology on ethical practice; law and religion and also judicial ethics. Perhaps most noticeable was the breakthrough to jurisdictions beyond the common law world, with delegates coming from over 35 countries with significant representation from eastern Europe (Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia) and the Middle East (Iran, Israel, Kuwait, Oman, Turkey). In a conference first, Professor Deborah Rhode delivered an ethical sermon at the Temple Church on the Sunday morning following ILEC (see D. Rhode, “Watching the Muffins—The Temple Church Sermon” (2014) 17 Legal Ethics 430).
Number 7 in the series saw ILEC return to the US, meeting in July 2016 at Fordham Law School in New York, with a conference theme of Ethics & Regulation of Lawyers Worldwide: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Superbly organised by the Stein Center for Law and Ethics, ILEC 7 hosted more than 450 attendees from over 60 countries, making it by far the largest ILEC meeting to date. A feature on the work and conference experiences of nine ILEC participants appears in the Fall 2016 edition of the Fordham Lawyer Magazine, ‘The Global Face of the Ethical Lawyer’. [http://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2016/12/13/the-global-face-of-the-ethical-lawyer/]
This is an edited and revised version of the history of the ILEC Conference published at http://www.iaole.org/history-of-iaole/
Final Program
Update: The International Association of Legal Ethics (IAoLE) General Assembly and Board meeting will be held at 12.30pm on Friday 7 December. All conference attendees are welcome to attend the General Assembly.
Paper Bank
The conference will take place at the Melbourne Law School at 185 Pelham Street, Carlton, just to the north of the Melbourne CBD. The conference is well-situated for hotels and restaurants, and close to main tram links through the city, via Swanston Street and Elizabeth Street.
Accommodation
Delegates are responsible for organising their own accommodation. For further information, please view a list of local hotels and apartments in the vicinity of the university.
Airports
Melbourne Tullamarine Airport (MEL) is the main international and domestic airport serving the city. It is located approximately 23 kilometres from the city centre. There is a frequent shuttle service (‘SkyBus’) from the airport to Southern Cross coach and railway station on the western edge of the CBD. The bus departs from outside Terminals 1, 3 and 4. An adult one-way ticket on Skybus currently costs AU$19 (return $36, as at December 2017). SkyBus also provides a free hotel shuttle to its passengers from Southern Cross station to most of the major city hotels. To check hotel shuttle availability and operating hours, go to https://www.skybus.com.au/free-city-hotel-shuttle/participating-hotels/. Licensed taxis and Uber rides are also available at Tullamarine airport. A one-way licensed taxi to the city should cost in the region of AU$55-$65.
Some domestic and budget airlines fly into Avalon airport, 50 kms south-west of Melbourne. SkyBus also operates daily services to and from Avalon, meeting all major flights. Please be aware that the journey time to and from Southern Cross to Avalon is approximately 50 minutes. Fares for Avalon are AU$22 one-way, $42 for a return (December 2017 prices).
Passport and visa
We regret that we cannot provide any specific advice on passport and visa requirements or application times. Australian government information on applying for entry visas to Australia can be found at https://www.border.gov.au/Trav/Visa-1
Call for Submissions
Submissions are now invited for the Biennial IAOLE Deborah Rhode Prize for the best legal ethics paper by an early career scholar
The Deborah Rhode Prize for Early Career Scholars was established by the International Association of Legal Ethics in 2015, and named after the Association’s first President, Professor Deborah L. Rhode of Stanford Law School. The inaugural competition was won by Sarah Winsberg, a JD/PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, for her essay “Attorney ‘mal-practices’: an invisible ethical problem in the early American republic”. The published version can be found in Legal Ethics, vol 19(2), pp.187-2016 (2016).
Submissions are invited on any topic that meets the mission of the international journalLegal Ethics*. Papers must be no more than 10,000 words in length; previously unpublished work, and written in or translated into English. To be considered, papers should be uploaded to the Legal Ethics online submission portal by Friday, 17 August 2018. Please include on the first page of your submission a clear statement that the paper is to be considered for the Deborah Rhode prize and that the author is an early career scholar**.
The winning paper will be announced and prize presented at ILEC VIII. The author will have the opportunity to present the paper at ILEC VIII on a special panel. The paper will be guaranteed publication in Legal Ethics.
*The mission of Legal Ethics is stated as follows:
- “Legal Ethics is an international and interdisciplinary journal devoted to the field of legal ethics.
- The journal provides an intellectual meeting ground for academic lawyers, practitioners and policy-makers to debate developments shaping the ethics of law and its practice at the micro and macro levels.
- Its focus is broad enough to encompass empirical research on the ethics and conduct of the legal professions and judiciary, studies of legal ethics education and moral development, ethics development in contemporary professional practice, the ethical responsibilities of law schools, professional bodies and government, and jurisprudential or wider philosophical reflections on law as an ethical system and on the moral obligations of individual lawyers.”
** ‘Early career scholars’ include those who are up to 5 years post-PhD; those with normally no more than 5 years employment in an academic teaching and/or research position, or those who can make a case that they fit in the early career category for other reasons.