Which individuals should count in a welfare-consequentialist analysis of public policy? Some answers to this question are parochial, and others are more inclusive. The most inclusive possible answer is ‘everybody to count for one.’ In other words, all individuals who are capable of having welfare – including foreigners, the unborn, and non-human animals – should be weighed equally. This article argues that ‘who should count’ is a question that requires a two-level answer. On the first level, a specification of welfare-consequentialism (...) serves as an ethical ideal, a claim about the attributes that the ideal policy would have. ‘Everybody to count for one’ might succeed on this level. However, on the second level is the welfare-consequentialist analysis procedure used by human analysts to give advice on real policy questions. For epistemic reasons, the analysis procedure should be more parochial than ‘everybody to count for one.’. (shrink)

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Dr Noel Semple, Professor Russell Pearce and Professor Renee Knake combine to compare legal profession regulation in the US with that of the countries closest to it institutionally and culturally: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland. This enables them to develop an illuminating taxonomy of legal professional regulation, and to describe the assumptions and objectives underlying the different approaches to regulation. The US and Canada provide a 'professionalist-independent framework' that centres on 'a unified, hegemonic occupation of lawyer' (...) which promotes self-regulation, and the exclusion of non-lawyers from partnership and investment in law practices. By contrast, in other countries that they examine, 'consumerist-competitive approaches' predominate, opening up the profession to co-regulation with executive government and allowing for different forms of legal occupations and non-lawyer influence and investment in law practices. Of course, as they show, in some countries there are combinations and hybrids of these two approaches. Unlike Rhode, who endorses England and Wales' consumerist-competitive approach to regulation in the Legal Services Act 2007, Semple, Pearce and Knake consciously avoid stating a preference for one approach over the other. (shrink)