The present course aims to explain what is the concept of 'professional ethic', why and how a set of professional ethical standards can be added to the laws and regulations applying to all the citizens.
The practice of certain professions affecting the human being justifies additional requirements to be burdened by those exercising in order to provide a guarantee to whoever consults them, because trust must be absolute.
Among the concerned legal professions, the ethics of lawyers, judges and notaries are essentially approached in this course.
The ethics of lawyers is the most elaborated and organized one. Hence it will guide us through this course and highlight the key issue(s) encountered in legal professional ethics, namely the conflict of values. It is essential to identify those values, to explain their importance in the exercise of above mentioned legal professions and the real need to guarantee them for the ultimate beneficiaries of ethics, namely the triable.
The present course will go through the institutions in which those ethical standards are enacted and will detail their modus operandi in order to understand the evolution of the ethics over the past decades. The disciplinary procedure and disciplinary sanctions will also be approached in this course.
Some regulations included in the lawyer's Code of Conduct will be analyzed and completed by personal experiences.
About the ethics of judges and notaries, a senior judge and an eminent representative of the 'Fédération des Notaires' will participate to the lecture and highlight the particularities of the professional ethical standards in their respective professions.
Finally, an opening to other professional ethics closes this course in order to emphasize once more the real need for the citizens in this optic and the developments made by the ethics in other professions but also in private and public companies aiming to increase citizens'faith.
Student participation during the lectures is expected and strongly encouraged.
