Teaching Law Students about Ethics

William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and one of the book’s authors, said he is gratified that legal educators and others have taken the concerns outlined in the book seriously.

“Part of our intent was to engender deeper, wider conversations” about teaching legal education, including ethics, Sullivan said. “This, I think, has begun to happen.”

Ethics should be a part of the full law school education, Sullivan said.

Professional responsibility classes tended to be a single, stand-alone class that the book’s authors believed was a way of teaching ethics in a defensive way, according to Sullivan.

Change afoot

“I think there is a movement toward change, toward, most importantly, some increased integration,” said Lawrence C. Marshall, a professor at Stanford Law School.

Marshall added, however, that ethics courses at some law schools count for two credit hours and are taught by adjunct professors, which can signal to students that the class is less significant than the rest of the course work.

“It’s problematic because, more than any other subject that law students study, the law of professional responsibility and the ethical/ moral principles of the lawyers role will affect students as lawyers on a daily basis,” Marshall said.

“To me, it’s always just been so strange that we’ll spend weeks on some doctrine of tort law that students likely will never see, yet we’ll give short shrift to critical rules of the profession that will pervade their professional careers,” he said.

Marshall believes that, for some reason, legal ethics tends to be a subject that isn’t necessarily the main scholarship area of those who teach that subject.

“At some level it has developed a reputation as a more pedestrian, practical-oriented course,” Marshall said.

Law schools that provide professional responsibility classes in the first year’s curriculum include the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and Mercer University School of Law in Macon, Ga.

In the wake of the Carnegie report, Indiana University’s law school launched a first-year class called “The Legal Profession,’’ which in part promotes and informs debate about ethical issues.

Gerald Hess, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, Wash., cited another book in addition to the Carnegie report as helping to stimulate discussion about legal education — “Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map,’’ published by Roy T. Stuckey, an emeritus professor at the University of South Carolina Law School, and others.

“Both those books concluded that successful lawyers need things that the traditional legal education provides and also need a wide variety of practical lawyer skills and professionalism,” Hess said.

“In the last two years, lots of law schools had been looking at their current curriculums and their current educating of law students,” said Hess, a co-director of the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning. “Some schools have made curricular changes and others are considering making changes in response to the challenge in both books.”

For example, Gonzaga University’s law school has adopted a new required curriculum that includes skills and professionalism laboratories for first-year students and a mandatory clinical class or externship during third year, according to Hess.

A number of law schools are taking steps to focus additional energy and resources on teaching professionalism skills and values, he added.

In 1973, the American Bar Association adopted a standard requirement relating to professional responsibility for law schools.

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