Conscientious Objection and Legal Profession. Critical Review about Legal (Lack of) Culture

Sa？etak The paper deals with the critical questioning of the relation between legitimate imposed legal obligations and the rights to refuse these obligations based on the right of the freedom of conscience, i.e. conscientious objection. The critical perspective that is applied to conduct the questioning is a legal profession because, in Croatian legal culture, there is no articulated answer to the question of how to reconcile these two obligations within the legal profession. The paper draws on the comprehension of John Rawls’s theory of conscientious objection since it is a systematic analysis of justice that shall submit subjective understanding of the good (conscience) to the principle of right (legitimate imposed obligation). In practice, the focus is on the grounds for acknowledging conscientious objection among lawyers as well on the obstacles to exercising this right