Ethics Education in the First Year: An Experiment

Abstract

This is an account of one law school's experiment with teaching the required professional responsibility course in the first year. From spring 1992 through spring 1994, the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law (Boalt Hall) taught a required two-unit1 course entitled Legal Profession to all firstyear students, using a uniform set of teaching materials prepared and revised with the generous support of the W.M. Keck Foundation. During this experiment, the faculty members involved in the course developed a strong set of teaching materials, a strong commitment to teaching from those materials, and an unshakable conviction that the course could not be taught properly in less than three units. The majority of Boalt's faculty were unwilling to make three units available for legal ethics in the first year, but were prepared to do so in the second year. Accordingly, at the close of our experiment, the faculty voted to expand the course to three units and to move the course to the second year. The first part of this article presents the history of our required professional responsibility course, explains why our faculty initially decided to move the required course to the first year, and describes some important related decisions that influenced the course's design and reception. The next part of the article offers a history of the experiment, which describes the curriculum we assembled, how we taught it, how the students reacted (in a nutshell, not well), how we revised our curriculum and pedagogy in light of that reaction, how the course improved, and how, notwithstanding that improvement, we ultimately decided to move the course to the second year.