Ethics now enjoys a place in the academic lawyer's landscape that was scarcely conceivable 15 to 20 years ago. This article considers how the role of ethics in teaching, research and practice has grown and some of the intellectual fall out from that growth-in law, jurisprudence, legal practice, applied philosophy in general, and legal ethics in particular. The observations made are based primarily on the Australian legal academy, though it is unclear as to whether there is any fundamental difference between that and the British equivalent.