Encouraging Personal Responsibility. An Alternative Approach to Teaching Legal Ethics

Abstract

Largely as a result of prompting by the American Bar Association (ABA), most American law schools now require students to take a class called Professional Responsibility or Legal Ethics before graduation. For some schools, little prompting by the ABA was needed, as ethics was already a central part of their required curriculum. Notre Dame Law School was among this group of law schools. Since the late 1970s, Notre Dame students have been required to take two classes in ethics. In an effort to emphasize the importance that the school attaches to the subject, a two-credit course is taught to the firstyear students by the dean of the law school. A second two-credit course may be taken in either the second or third year.' The ABA's campaign for a renewed emphasis on ethics stems from a desire that lawyers return to the of professionalism.' How law schools should go about teaching their students these principles has never been as clear, for example, as how to teach students federal taxation. Does one try merely to teach students professional responsibility by covering the rules and tenets contained in the Model Rules and Code, or does one evaluate these professional rules in terms of a more general set of moral criteria? For most ethics classes, students are expected to buy copies of the ABA Code of Professional Responsibility, the ABA Model Rules, or both. These students spend their time