Teaching Law Students about Ethics
September 1, 2009
The current version of Standard 302(a)(5) states that a law school shall require that each student receive substantial instruction in “the history, goals, structure, values and responsibilities of the legal profession and its members.”
The current Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination is a 60-question, two-hour and five-minute, multiple-choice examination that must be passed before a person receives a law license.
Teaching methods
Law students have learned about legal ethics through three major methods over the past several decades.
The dominant method for teaching professional responsibility to law students is the problem method, said Robert P. Burns, a veteran professor at Northwestern University School of Law.
Under that method, students discuss stand-alone hypothetical problems that raise legal ethics issues.
Some law professors continue to use the Socratic Method, which involves questioning students about legal ethics based on appellate court cases, Burns said.
A third version is the so-called pervasive method pioneered by Deborah L. Rhode at Stanford University School of Law and David J. Luban with the Georgetown University Law Center in which legal ethics “pervade’’ the law school’s curriculum, Burns said.
Under the pervasive method, law schools are called upon “to incorporate ethical issues into the full range of doctrinal courses,” according to the Carnegie report.
“The value of this approach is now widely acknowledged, case books and other materials for incorporating ethical concerns into many courses have been developed, and most law schools say their faculty do use the pervasive method, at least to some extent,” the Carnegie report added.
At Northwestern’s law school, students are taught professional responsibility in an integrated program that includes introduction to trial advocacy and the law of evidence classes, Burns said.
The students are immersed in the role of a trial lawyer in a simulated situation where students interview actors posing as clients, interview witnesses, prepare clients to testify, and engage in direct and cross-examination of witnesses, he said.
“We think the integration of ethics, especially using the simulation method, helps to make ethical norms dyed in the wool,” Burns said.
“As the students are becoming trial lawyers, they are also learning to become ethically responsible trial lawyers,” he said.
Stanford’s Marshall, a former Northwestern law school professor, took the simulation method a step further.
Marshall teaches professional responsibility courses to second- and third-year students who participate in Stanford’s clinical law programs. Marshall has constituted the class as an ethics committee for the clinics.
“This is not a simulation, this is real,” Marshall said. “So, in fact, they are acting as the ethics committee.”
Marshall presents an actual ethical dilemma in memorandum form from one of the clinics to the students. The students research the issue by locating the appropriate rules and must be prepared to discuss how the problem will be addressed, he said.
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