This PhD Work-In-Progress presentation is only open to RegNet staff and students.
It presents tentative conclusions of research on how systems regulating lawyers in Pacific Island Countries (PICs) should be designed and should operate. Feedback and questions are sought on the fluency of ideas presented, missing links, or things the presenter may wish to watch/cover in his arguments and any ways of improving the presentation ahead of adapting it into a future presentation for his thesis defence.
The Pacific region presents a complex, adaptive and challenging environments for legal practice. The existing paradigm for ensuring lawyer competence and ethics draws heavily from colonially-inherited legal formalist approaches. Such approaches are demonstrably unsuitable to regulating complexity and are particularly limited by their rigidity and ‘inertia’.
David Naylor’s research on the relationships, environments and phenomena that influence lawyer conduct in three PICs suggests that it may be helpful to understand legal practice as a complex adaptive system (CAS).
Using this framing, it is possible to distinguish between ‘people and things that influence’ conduct, and specific adaptive actors interested in, or responsible for, the design and operation of systems regulating lawyer conduct. These include any legal/bureaucratic regulators; courts/the judiciary; law schools; and professional associations.
David’s tentative conclusion is that such regulators ought to utilise adaptive and responsive regulatory strategies which recognise the temporal and multi-variate influences of lawyer competence and ethics in practice in PICs. This requires regulatory actors to steer towards an active rather than passive role in cultivating, monitoring and intervening in patterns influencing lawyer competence and ethics to support lawyers to be ‘good lawyers’.
About the Speaker
David Naylor joined RegNet in 2017 to research the regulation of the legal profession in the South Pacific. David is a lecturer at the School of Law, University of the South Pacific and has previously worked at the Law Council of Australia and as Administrator of the South Pacific Lawyers’ Association.
David’s central research interest is on how both bureaucratic and relational regulators can achieve regulatory goals, such as access to justice, or ensuring the rule of law, within complex and resource-constrained environments with many legal and normative orders. David’s research is currently focused on the Pacific Islands region.
This is a hybrid event: a Zoom session will be held concurrently with a live presentation in the RegNet Level 2 Teaching Room. Zoom meeting login details will only be circulated internally to RegNet staff and students.
Image credit: Photo of Chuuk Lagoon, Federated States of Micronesia, by Marek Okon at Unsplash (Free to use under the Unsplash License)