Law and Ethics

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, courses on professional responsibility have been the stepchildren of the legal curriculum. Many law schools, especially the large national ones, either had no courses or short courses designed to consider this subject matter. Although a great number of schools did have required courses, with some notable exceptions they were not well regarded either by students or faculty. Often they were taught by faculty members with little interest in the subject matter or by outside practitioners brought in to give lectures, which turned out to be either anecdotes or recitals of rules of law, or both. Indeed, many faculty, taking the position that ethics could not be taught, conceived that a course in professional responsibility had no inherent intellectual content. Over the past fifteen years, there has been a remarkable change of view, although it has not yet completely swept the field. Great changes in substantive law have focused attention on the unmet need for legal services, on the performance of individual lawyers, and on the relationship between the profession and the achievement of social goals. Faculty and students have perceived the intellectual content and importance of issues of professional responsibility. New materials have been developed. Watergate, and especially the involvement of so many lawyers in malfeasance, provided a sense of urgency to supplement the arguments of those who urged that more attention be paid to these issues. Finally, the American Bar Association required a minimum of instruction in professional responsibility as a condition of accreditation. Some states have gone even further, requiring a course in professional responsibility for admission to the bar. At the same time, new developments in the law of professional responsibility, emanating from court decisions and government agencies, especially the Securities and Exchange Commission, have forced the profession to pay attention to these problems as a matter of self-interest. The result has been a new interest in professional responsibility throughout the profession. A number of professional conferences have been devoted solely to various substantive aspects in the field. The same attitude is apparent in the law school world. Since 1948, there have been numerous conferences devoted to the teaching of professional responsibility. The earlier debate over whether the subject matter ought to be taught in a course by itself or pervasively throughout the curriculum has died away. Most now agree that however attractive the pervasive method appears theoretically, the subject matter is not likely to be presented in a coherent and structured way unless it is taught in an independent course. Such a focused course tends also to bring relevant issues into the rest of the curriculum.