Disciplinary power: “runners”, cause lawyering and the demonization of Phil Shiner

Through a case study on the spectacular downfall of one of the most famous UK human rights lawyers who represented numerous Iraqi victims of war to seek accountability against the UK government for wartime abuses and championed many other causes against the interest of the political establishment, this chapter examines the potential for professional rules of legal ethics to be mobilized for political ends. The chapter argues that the professional rules of legal ethics concerning client acquisition methods and related fee arrangements are dubious in principle in the context of public law work for legal-aid assisted clients and have been complicit in practice in facilitating institutional crackdown on legal activism by casting Shiner as an ‘unethical’ lawyer, whose clients’ claims are then portrayed as necessarily baseless. Drawing on Foucault's theory of ‘disciplinary power’, the chapter demonstrates how certain professional rules of legal ethics function to construct a category of lawyers as true ‘public service’ providers rightfully disabled from soliciting clients or using fee-charging agents, to produce a façade of egalitarian justice that in fact silences victims and, ultimately, to ‘discipline’ individuals through the normalizing gaze of public opinion.