"Humility has been claimed to be a virtue that is relevant to a variety of legal scholarly discussions. However, the most the most prominent use that humility has been put to in law is as an adjudicative virtue that favours judicial restraint. Contrary to what views of humility as judicial restraint have it, the value of humility in law is hardly restricted to the judiciary -let alone to it providing an argument for judicial deference. Humility, understood as a relational virtue that is a mean between self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation, is exceedingly relevant for all the legal professions."
As a part of our online seminar series we were delighted to be joined by Professor Amalia Amaya, Edinburgh University. Prof. Amaya is British Academy Global Professor in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh, where her work focuses on the philosophy of law. She is currently working on law, virtue, and character and has recently co-edited Law, Virtue and Justice (with Ho Hock Lai, 2020), The Faces of Virtue in Law (with Claudio Michelon, 2020), and Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Legal Reasoning (with Maksymilian del Mar, 2020). She holds an LLM and PhD from the European Institute as well as an LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School. In this recording, Prof. Amaya argues that humility has an important impact on the organizational dimensions of the legal profession, it is critical for excelling in professional legal practice, and it is also central to professional development.