Professional Responsibility Courses Research Articles

Legal Ethics in the American Practice of Law

The author examines in this article the professional legal ethics in the United States, more commonly known as “professional responsibility”, as a subject to an unusual pattern of “codification”. Detailed rules historically originated with the legal profession itself, initially in legal doctrine and then a Code of Ethics published in 1887 by the Alabama State Bar Association. Whatever borrowing occurred among states when introducing their own “codes of ethics”, the Alabama model was drawn upon when, in 1908, the American Bar Association approved “32 Canons of Professional Ethics”. The sources of law regulating the professional conduct of lawyers in the United States are several. The legal ethics within state courts is regulated by the courts, the legislative (or parliamentary) organ, and the Bar of each state. Professional responsibility, in the spirit of David Hoffman, has become an integral part of legal education and licensing. Law students take a compulsory course in professional responsibility and are required to pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination administered nationally in the United States by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The author concludes, that legal ethics has been an integral part of American legal education since the early nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the legal profession itself introduced “private” canons of ethics which were then accepted by the highest courts in virtually all states as rules of professional conduct binding upon all members of the Bar. It remains a distinctive element of the American legal system that binding rules of professional conduct are formed mostly by the courts, and not by the legislature. These rules are initially “codified” by a voluntary non-State organization, adopted by the courts, and then applied by the courts in cases which ultimately become components of the law of precedent; that is, a separate and distinct source of law.

Bridging the Gap: How Introducing Ethical Skills Exercises Will Enrich Learning in First Year Courses

Law schools have begun to raise the bar beyond the baseline mandates and aspirational goals of MacCrate and Carnegie, and are looking seriously at how to implement the suggested methods of Best Practices and other innovative models. Facing increasing pressure to prepare law students to be ethical, competent practitioners, law schools must rise to the challenge of introducing a broad range of practical skills and ethical values across the curriculum and throughout the three years of law school. It is no longer reasonable that a single required course in professional responsibility will somehow suffice to instill the long-lasting and deep values in legal ethics expected by both the members of our profession, clients, and the American public. Instead, law schools are introducing more experiential opportunities throughout the curriculum that offer students the opportunity to integrate and apply the range of skills and substantive law that they have learned.These opportunities seem to be entirely unavailable during the first year of law studies. This is a missed opportunity, since first-year courses are fertile ground for exposure to principles of professional responsibility. It is in this time period when students are in the process of learning foundational lawyering skills. Law faculty who teach first-year courses face unique challenges as they seek to orient law students to basic legal methods, analysis, and the concept of doctrinal law stemming from cases and statutes. The authors’ own teaching experiences and research have shown that offering students the opportunity to apply doctrine in a practical context through simulated client interactions leads to a richer and more complete legal education, which we believe better prepares students for the ethical and competent practice of law. As part of these simulations, students are given a chance to experiment with foundational lawyering skills such as client interviewing and counseling, problem-solving, drafting and synthesis of law and fact. While experimenting with these skills, students will also wrestle with the types of ethical dilemmas they will face in practice.We share one approach of how a Contracts professor and a Lawyers’ Ethics professor are responding to these challenges in a first-year classroom and offer theoretical and practical support for the notion that providing students with the opportunity to develop and hone essential lawyering skills through simulations within the context of a doctrinal class will better prepare our students for the ethical and competent practice of law.The Article offers support for the integration of ethical considerations into the first year of law school generally. We examine the learning objectives sought to be satisfied through the integration of ethics and contracts, and provide a description of this problem-centered exercise usable in any first year contracts class, with the fact pattern and other supporting documentation necessary to run the simulation attached as Appendices. The Article concludes with anecdotal results from the authors’ use of this exercise, and suggestions for assessment tools for faculty to use in evaluating the exercise.

Teaching with Emotion: Enriching the Educational Experience of First-Year Law Students

Through the case method and Socratic dialogue, first year law students are taught to develop critical legal analytic skills-to “think like a lawyer.” Those skills, however, are primarily, if not entirely, intellectual. This article discusses the need to address emotional issues in educating law students. Unlike other articles, my article does not merely urge professors to raise such issues in their classes and discuss them analytically. Rather, I want students to actually experience emotion in the classroom setting as they discuss various fact situations and the legal principles involved in the resolution of disputes involving those facts. Law students need to understand and appreciate the emotions of people, including their own emotions, if they are to become the best lawyers they are capable of becoming. Educating law students about emotions should not be deferred until upper class clinical courses or professional responsibility courses. The place to begin that education is in the first year. To encourage such education, I present specific examples from my first-year Torts class in which I raise issues in a manner that results in an emotional response by students. I demonstrate how such methodology stimulates class discussion and enriches the law student’s educational experience.

Eloquor, Advocatus! Ancient Influences on Professional Responsibility

Law schools' professional responsibility courses cover ethical requirements of practicing attorneys and occasionally delve into moral obligations owed to the public. One topic not regularly studied is the profession itself as a profession, as opposed to a trade or other business. Professions have existed for much of human history in many ancient cultures. Much of modern European law is directly descended from the Roman legal system, and many elements of our own common law were developed in Ancient Rome. In many ways, Rome was the birthplace for jurisprudence as we know it. If Roman law laid the foundation for modern law, then how much did the ancient Roman bar contribute to the modern legal profession? This paper will argue that the ancient bar shared many of the same characteristics of professionalism as modern attorneys.

Priming for Pro Bono Publico: Inculcating a Norm of Public Service in New Lawyers

The paper explores pro bono by new lawyers as a form of professional volunteerism, relying on data gathered from 1,000 law students and lawyers. The paper first presents social science insights into volunteerism outside the law, including the psychology of helping, sociologists' insights into the social context of volunteering, and economists' analysis of conscience goods. The paper then presents data from two major surveys: recent law school graduates and students in Professional Responsibility courses. The study includes (1) individual attitudes, including approaches to moral reasoning, attributions related to poverty, and community orientation; (2) the impact of law school, including skill building and comparisons to family and religious influences; and (3) the role of the profession, including the impact of professional responsibility rules and invitations to participate.

Professional Responsibility as a Lawyering Skill

For too long, the teaching of professional responsibility has generated dissatisfaction on the part of faculty and students alike. Complaints abound of dry and mechanical exploration of rules and cases and an emphasis on abstract philosophical concepts that lack the framework to establish a meaningful understanding of the pivotal role professional responsibility plays in the daily life of a lawyer.1 While the problems inherent in teaching the subject have long been recognized, little real progress has been made to move away from the traditional large class lecture/discussion teaching methodology still prevalent in the curriculum of many law schools. If anything approaching progress can be claimed, it is only in the recognition that traditional teaching methods do not adequately present the subject in a way that both stimulates and informs students, and allows them to assimilate the information and skills necessary for the ethical pursuit of a career in the law. The solutions that have generally been proposed to deal with the problems surrounding the teaching of professional responsibility seem to fall into two basic categories. The first attempts to address the perception that the course lacks sufficient intellectual and doctrinal content to give it the kind of stature that other courses in the curriculum command. Without such stature, it is argued, neither students nor faculty will perceive professional responsibility as a subject that belongs at the core of a program to prepare students for their role as lawyers. In other words, if professional responsibility courses were structured to look and feel more like such core courses as Contracts, Torts, and Property, students and faculty would take the class more seriously than they currently do.2

A course in professional responsibility for computer scientists

article A course in professional responsibility for computer scientists Share on Author: Batya Friedman Director, Interdisciplinary Computer Science Graduate Program, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA Director, Interdisciplinary Computer Science Graduate Program, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCAS Computers and SocietyVolume 20Issue 3Oct. 1990 pp 174–179https://doi.org/10.1145/97351.97424Online:01 August 1990Publication History 2citation608DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations2Total Downloads608Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Pedagogy Without Purpose: An Essay on Professional Responsibility Courses and Casebooks

The involvement of so many attorneys in the Watergate scandal caused the bar to wonder how to better train ethical lawyers. The American Bar Association instituted an accreditation requirement that law schools compel their students to take a professional responsibility course. Additionally, many states began requiring passage of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination as a condition for admission to the bar. These actions, however, were taken with little thought about how legal ethics should be studied. Rather, the assumption has been that a lawyer is ethical if he or she knows the Code of Professional Responsibility and can demonstrate that knowledge on a multiple choice test. I believe that such an approach to professional responsibility, emphasizing just learning the Code, is largely useless. Memorizing a few rules has little relation to ethical practice. In fact, such an approach is counterproductiveinstead of encouraging students to consider the difficult issues confronting all lawyers, it lets them feel content merely to learn a handful of canons and disciplinary rules. To illustrate how pervasive this approach to legal ethics is, and how empty, I want to focus on three major casebooks on professional responsibility that have been published in the past two years. They are selected because they are extensively used and therefore likely reflect how professional responsibility

Pedagogy without Purpose: An Essay on Professional Responsibility Courses and Casebooks

Pedagogy without Purpose: An Essay on Professional Responsibility Courses and Casebooks

Training the Ethical Lawyer: A Rejoinder to Schneyer: [Reply/Rejoinder

Is there a sick patient? I think that the real disagreement between Professor Schneyer and me is over whether there is a problem in the way professional responsibility courses traditionally are taught. My analysis is based on the observation that legal ethics classes often are viewed by teachers and, especially, students as neither useful nor effective. I suggest that courses which primarily emphasize teaching students the codes of professional responsibility are neglecting basic moral questions about the role of the lawyer that should be the focus of professional ethics classes. Schneyer apparently begins with the premise that there is no major problem with this part of the curriculum; his essay is an enthusiastic defense of current courses and casebooks.1 He explicitly defends the desirability of legal ethics courses that emphasize teaching the professional codes.2 This divergence in starting points explains our different views of the books I reviewed.3 I look at the books and see texts primarily directed to teaching the codes;4 books that do not adequately encourage students to question the moral duties of an attorney; books that disproportionately emphasize problems confronting the litigator; books that do not focus enough on examining the method of professional regulation. Schneyer looks at the books and generally likes what he sees. The few passages on the role of the attorney in socie-

Law and Ethics

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.