The Moral Compass of Law: Ensuring Ethical Standards Through Legal Education?

Abstract

The aim of the article is to answer the question of the importance of legal education in ensuring legal ethics and the moral compass of a person by understanding the most important aspects of it. Methods applied include theoretical-scientific analysis, systematic and critical review of scientific literature and other relevant sources, normative and critical analysis of ethical principles in the context of legal education, empirical-quantitative and qualitative analysis of scholarly articles. According to the main thesis of this article, the integration of ethics into legal education can enhance moral development of future lawyers and improve their ability to serve justice. This paper traces the historical neglect of ethics in legal education and argues for its central place in modern studies. For lawyers to serve justice, a well-defined moral compass is essential. Several conclusions are drawn in this article, and first of all it is believed that universities will have to realise that a good lawyer is not only a professionally competent lawyer, because that is not enough in today’s world. Even if it is a personal journey, universities cannot stand aside, the future lawyer must be helped to grow. What is much more important is not so much the codes of ethics but how our moral compass works and what path it can point us down. To avoid getting lost, law schools could teach future lawyers how to empower their moral compass and find their way around. Each law teacher should have to find ways to teach the key virtues of a lawyer’s moral compass (e.g., wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice), how to help law students grow and not burn out in difficult situations. As our empirical research shows, the best scholarly articles on legal education discuss the elements of legal ethics. It is recognised that the ethics of lawyers is increasingly becoming an issue that goes beyond the professional aspects, and it is the university that must contribute to the development of the moral compass.