Editorial

The current special issue explores how laws regulating lawyers, including codes of conduct, interact with the lived experiences of lawyers and how this interaction affects and is affected by societal expectations.

The first paper of the issue, by Tomáš Friedel, discusses the need for written codes of conduct in legal professions and provides insight into the adoption and content of codes of conduct of judges, prosecutors and attorneys in the Czech Republic. Tomáš expounds reasons for the adoption of codes, such as their regulatory function or their contribution to the discourse on ethics. He also develops some arguments against codes of conduct; for example, ethics cannot be legislated and codes of conduct can be misused. Next, he investigates different types of codes, focusing on the rule-based vs. norm-based dichotomy. In the second part of the paper, he very dynamically introduces domestic codes in the Czech Republic, as well as the ideas and people that formed them, mention