Julian Webb

University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School, Faculty Member

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I am Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne. My primary areas of interest involve lawyer's ethics and professional regulation, legal education and law and technology/law tech. I also do work around civil justice, legal theory (especially complexity, systems theory and the phenomenology of law), and socio-legal research ethics and methods. From April 2011 to June 2013 I led the Research Team for the SRA/BSB/IPS Legal Education and Training Review, which was the most fundamental review of English legal education in over forty years. I have undertaken research and consultancy projects for the UN Development Programme, Law Society of England & Wales, the Netherlands Council of the Judiciary, the Hong Kong government and the New Zealand Council of Legal Education, amongst others. I am currently Senior Policy Advisor on law reform and digital justice for The New Liberals (TNL) a newly (2019) established progressive Australian political party.

I previously held chairs at the Universities of Warwick (2006-14) and Westminster (1999-2006) in the UK. From May 2006 I was Director of the Higher Education Academy's UK Centre for Legal Education until its closure at the end of July 2011. I co-edit, with John Paterson (Aberdeen) the 'Law, Science and Society' book series published by Routledge. Between 1998 and 2008, I was a founding editor of the journal 'Legal Ethics' (Hart Publishing).

I welcome PhD students in any of my main areas of research, and am happy to discuss ideas and proposals at any stage of development. Recent and current supervised topics include: solicitors' conflicts of interest under outcomes-focused regulation; the institutional logics of NewLaw; ODR in consumer disputes, and legislation as code.

Further details of my current projects can be found via my publications and blogs.
Phone: +61 (0)3 83442547
Address: Melbourne Law School
University of Melbourne
VIC 3010

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Books by Julian Webb

Setting Standards: The Future of Legal Services Education and Training in England and Wales ('LETR Report')

by Julian Webb, Paul Maharg, and Avrom Sherr

Learning Legal Rules 10th Ed (Oxford, 2019)

Learning Legal Rules is an introduction to legal method that sets out to bring together the theor... more Learning Legal Rules is an introduction to legal method that sets out to bring together the theory, structure, and practice of legal reasoning in a readily accessible style. The book explores techniques of legal research, writing, and legal analysis. It discusses the operation of precedent and statutory interpretation with chapters specifically on the impact of EC Law and the Human Rights Act 1998.

Sorry no previews are available for this book.

Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process (Cambridge, 2005)

Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process bridges the gap between academic and practical law for stu... more Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process bridges the gap between academic and practical law for students undertaking skills-based and clinical legal education courses at university. It develops oral and written communication, group working, problem solving and conflict resolution skills in a range of legal contexts: client interviewing, drafting, managing cases, legal negotiation and advocacy. The book is designed specifically to help students to practise and develop skills that will be essential in a range of occupations; develop a deeper understanding of the English legal process and the lawyer's role in that process; enhance their understanding of the relationship between legal skills and ethics; and understand how they learn and how they can make their learning more effective.

Professional Legal Ethics: Critical Interrogations (Oxford, 1999)

Ethics and regulation have become catchwords of the late 1990s, yet relatively little has been wr... more Ethics and regulation have become catchwords of the late 1990s, yet relatively little has been written about the ethical discourse and regulation of the legal professions in England and Wales. This book represents the first attempt to subject the ethical discourse of the English legal professions to in-depth analysis and sustained critique. Drawing on insights from moral philosophy, social theory, the sociology of the legal profession, public law theories of regulation, and the extensive American literature on lawyers' ethics, it argues that, in seeking to provide definitive answers to particular problems of professional conduct, professional legal ethics has failed to deliver an approach which requires lawyers actively to engage with the ethical issues raised by legal practice. Through an analysis of the core issues facing lawyers, the authors locate this failure in the profession's reliance on a liberal and adversarial role morality that conceptualises the ethical values of human dignity, autonomy and equality in a formalistic and narrowly legalistic manner. This encourages lawyers to overlook the real invasions of these values so often wrought by upholding clients legal rights, and to ignore the competing claims of affected third parties, the wider community and the environment In seeking to move beyond critique, the authors develop throughout the book a contextual approach to individual ethical decision-making and outline a range of institutional, regulatory and educational reforms which, they suggest, could form the basis for a more ethical brand of professionalism.

Julian Webb

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