The "Infusion" Method at UCLA: Teaching Ethics Pervasively

Abstract

Although virtually all schools teach ethics, few standard parts of the curriculum are taught in so many different ways. At UCLA, this diversity of approach has followed from the presence of an unusual concentration of scholars writing about different aspects of legal and the legal profession, who sought to link their research to their teaching in the field. Over the years, UCLA students have learned about ethics and the sociology of the legal profession from such scholars as David Mellinkoff,1 Murray Schwartz,2 Richard Abel,3 Cruz Reynoso,4 and the authors of this essay.5 Thus, from the beginning, the focus on teaching about legal and the legal profession at UCLA was on the diversity of ways of teaching and learning about different aspects of legal and the legal profession. Informed by a professorial culture that took seriously all constituent disciplines in the teaching of professional responsibility-the rules of the law of lawyering, moral philosophy, sociology, economics, clinical and practical instruction, judicial and enforcement-we sought to introduce both our fellow colleagues and our students to the many layers and levels of issues implicated in the legal of lawyers. With funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation, we hoped to develop pervasive teaching, not only by infusing throughout the curriculum but by infusing it throughout all levels of the legal profession-students, faculty, practicing lawyers, scholars, and judges. The Keck Working Group was formed, whose leaders (Richard Abel and the authors of this essay) were linked by some common concerns: the effects of the organizational structure of work on legal and practice; the links to actual practice of dilemmas; and the teaching of an ethical methodology for