Our research questions are:
- What can the Post Office Scandal tell us about the causal pathways that lead to professional ethical problems for lawyers and miscarriages of justice? [RQ1]
- How did the victims of the Post Office Scandal experience ethical problems (referred to in RQ1) within their handling by the wider criminal justice system, and what can this tell us about failures to provide access to justice and mitigation of vulnerability? [RQ2]
- What explicit and implicit decision-making models shape causal pathways between ethical failures and miscarriages of justice? [RQ3]
- What ethical models have practical resonance with legal professionals? And how can they be strengthened? [RQ4]
Building and innovating on prior research, we focus on causal pathways, which we define as the ways of thinking and structural conditions for the professional pathologies we are interested in.
These pathways will show how ethical malpractice is constructed, legitimated, or ignored within organisations. Pathways should show where the problems identified in them can be resisted and professionally questionable practices prevented.