Camaraderie and conflict: Developing an occupational culture typology of publicly funded criminal defence lawyers in England and Wales

Welsh, Lucy and Newman, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3735-1026 2024. Camaraderie and conflict: Developing an occupational culture typology of publicly funded criminal defence lawyers in England and Wales. International Journal of the Legal Profession 31 (1) , pp. 21-52. 10.1080/09695958.2023.2260747

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

Renewed interest in the working lives of publicly funded lawyers has resulted in a growing body of research that has analysed factors which might affect how criminal defence lawyers envisage their role. Much of that work has adopted an ethnographic approach, producing important data that can tell us much about the occupational culture of publicly funded defence lawyers in England and Wales. This paper synthesises and integrates the findings of recent ethnographic work on publicly funded defence lawyers, adopting a broadly Bourdieusian approach to theories of occupational culture to draw out commonalities across the findings of various recent studies. We take these findings further, arguing that they can together allow us to develop a working typology or schema for the occupational culture of English and Welsh publicly funded criminal defence lawyers. We also draw on some lessons learned from key studies of ‘cop culture’ to identify seven apparently pervasive yet fluid characteristics of the working culture of this occupational group, before suggesting areas for further development. The seven characteristics that we identify in this article are camaraderie; expertise; economisation; standardisation; conflict, social justice and adversarialism, and pessimism.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Law Cardiff Law & Politics
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) K Law > KD England and Wales
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
ISSN:	0969-5958
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 September 2023
Date of Acceptance:	14 September 2023
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2024 12:31
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/162547

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item