Study On The Legal Professional Privilege In The English Law

As an important part of the legal profession,the primary task for lawyers is to provide legal advice and defend their clients necessarily.The professional ethics of a lawyer requires that it serve the clients in compliance with the law without undermining their interest.As an agent of the client,if the lawyer breaches the professional ethics and reveals the secrets or privacy of the party he knows in the process of providing legal service without consent,it may damage the trust base built between the lawyer and the client,causing the client to be somewhat reluctant in turning to lawyers for legal help.In due time,this may ultimately break the balance and efficiency within the justice system.Therefore,the rules of legal professional privilege are generally stipulated in the Anglo-American law,in order to ensure that each party feel free to exchange information with their lawyers in order to obtain legal advice.Under this rule,when the conditions stipulated by law are met,the parties may refuse to disclose or even prevent their lawyers or third parties from revealing secret conversations and correspondence between them.At times,some relevant evidence is excluded not because it is unreliable or irrelevant to the facts in issue,but because of extrinsic consideration which are held to outweigh the value that the evidence would have at trial.In the process of judicial reform in our country,the rules of evidence are gradually becoming completed.However,under the mode of authoritarian litigation with the aim of finding the objective truth and cracking down on crimes,it may place the relationship between the principal and the lawyer at a very embarrassing and tense situation emphasizing unreserved disclosure of evidence.In the early days of Elizabeth I,the British have established a traditional rule of evidence to protect the legitimate right for clients to seek legal advice--the legal professional privilege(LPP)rules.This rule of evidence is based on some certain professional relationship among which the legal professional privilege leaves me a deepest impression as I am about to be a member of the legal profession.Confidentiality obligations are not only the requirements set by professional ethics and norms,but also bound by legislative support.The development of legal professional privilege has a profound historical origin in the English common law and greatly affects other countries,such as the United States,Australia,etc.As such,the study of this rule in the British evidence law weighs a lot practically.This paper mainly introduces the legal professional privilege rules in the evidence law of England and Wales,which is rooted in the English common law.Its contents are codified in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984,while in civil litigation it's still stipulated by many judicial precedents.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter directly introduces the connotation of this concept and the value basis of its existence,including its definition,classification,characteristics and historical origins of this rule in British evidence law.This chapter is mainly about the overall depiction of this concept.The second chapter is to discuss the concrete applications of legal professional privilege rules in practice from the aspects of its basic elements,waiver and exceptions.The third chapter mainly analyzes its advantages and disadvantages as well as the development trends in future.Basing on the introduction and analysis above,the fourth chapter is here to do some comparison.Through the analysis of relative confidentiality obligations set by domestic rules,it discusses the significance of this reference for China in the context of contemporary judicial reform and attempts to draw a preliminary pattern of the application of the legal professional privilege in China.This paper mainly discusses these issues above.