Law Commons^™

When It Comes To Lawyers… Is An Ounce Of Prevention Worth A Pound Of Cure?, Laurel S. Terry

Laurel S. Terry

Is It Educational Malpractice Not To Teach Comparative Legal Ethics?, Susan Saab Fortney

Susan S. Fortney

This article addresses the importance of teaching legal ethics in law schools. After a brief introduction, this article outlines several reasons why it is necessary to have formal ethical training in law schools. The article then explains the different methods of teaching legal ethics that are utilized in the United States. The article also details why it is important and how to teaching comparative legal ethics in law schools due to increased globalization. The article concludes by identifying sources, such as the internet, for teaching comparative legal ethics.

Using The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Legal Ethics In A Property Course, Thomas L. Shaffer

Thomas L. Shaffer

No abstract provided.

David Hoffman's Law School Lectures, 1822-1833, Thomas L. Shaffer

Thomas L. Shaffer

No abstract provided.

Harmonizing Current Threats: Using The Outcry For Legal Education Reforms To Take Another Look At Civil Gideon And What It Means To Be An American Lawyer, Cathryn Miller-Wilson

Cathryn A. Miller-Wilson

"Harmonizing Current Threats: Using the Outcry for Legal Education Reforms to Take Another Look at Civil Gideon and What it Means to be an American Lawyer," makes the argument that, like medical education, legal education should be seen as a public responsibility. With the extra government funding that would come from this view of legal education, Miller-Wilson proposes incorporating "teaching law firms" after law school for students to practice in various specialties before graduation, similar to a medical residency.

Student, Esquire?: The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom, Nantiya Ruan

Nantiya Ruan

Law faculty and non-profit lawyers are working together in a variety of partnerships to offer students exposure to “real life” clients in the first year of law school, as well as in advanced courses in substantive areas. Teachers engaged in client-centered advocacy through experiential frameworks have broken out of their isolated silos in the law school (e.g., legal writing, clinical, externship, and doctrinal) and begun to work together. To help students develop a sense of professional identity, cultivate professional values, and tap into key intrinsic motivations for lawyering, such as serving the public good, collaborative classrooms have an important role …

Trends In Global Lawyer Regulation, Laurel S. Terry

Laurel S. Terry

Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

In his 1994 seminal article on Federalizing Legal Ethics, Prof. Fred Zacharias examined the need for a national and uniform code of ethics for attorneys. Prof. Zacharias was correct that there has been increasing pressure to federalize legal ethics, but that process is occurring not through articulation of national norms but rather through decentralized contextualization of attorney conduct norms. Federal agencies that direct securities practice, immigration, tax, patent, labor and many other areas of federal practice are increasingly supplementing state regulations to specifically regulate the attorneys who appear before their agencies. Targeted substantive federal law and treaty obligations also increasingly …

Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The rapidly expanding Chinese legal profession provides an extraordinary opportunity for the U.S. legal profession to test U.S. assumptions about legal ethics. This essay examines challenges facing Chinese legal education and the Chinese legal profession as it develops norms of legal ethics. This essay examines this process from the law school and law student’s perspective about legal ethics, and then briefly explores the effort to create norms of attorney conduct from a top-down perspective. Both a bottom-up and top-down view show the tremendous challenges facing the emerging Chinese legal culture in building a coherent model of lawyering that can serve …

Zacharias’S Prophecy: The Federalization Of Legal Ethics Through Legislative, Court, And Agency Regulation, Daniel R. Coquillette, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Daniel R. Coquillette

In his 1994 seminal article on Federalizing Legal Ethics, Prof. Fred Zacharias examined the need for a national and uniform code of ethics for attorneys. Prof. Zacharias was correct that there has been increasing pressure to federalize legal ethics, but that process is occurring not through articulation of national norms but rather through decentralized contextualization of attorney conduct norms. Federal agencies that direct securities practice, immigration, tax, patent, labor and many other areas of federal practice are increasingly supplementing state regulations to specifically regulate the attorneys who appear before their agencies. Targeted substantive federal law and treaty obligations also increasingly …

Professionalism: The Deep Theory, Daniel R. Coquillette

Daniel R. Coquillette

Can our personal ethics and our professional ethics be in opposition? Our professional identity as lawyers is at the center of our personal morality. The legal profession is in crisis because we have lost sight of the deep theory of professionalism. This article focuses on our ultimate motivation for obeying rules, concentrating on three common categories: goal-based, rights-based, and duty-based theories. By examining these theories, the article argues that lawyers must turn away from the modern trend of goal instrumentalism and refocus legal practice on its humanistic roots.

A Survey Of Professional Responsibility Courses At American Law Schools In 2009, Laurel S. Terry, Andrew Perlman, Margaret Raymond

Laurel S. Terry

Teach Justice, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

Law schools must improve their preparation of students to practice law ethically. Current law school curricula focus on preparing students to analyze legal issues but not ethical issues. A curriculum that encourages students to distance themselves from their ethical instincts is dangerous. A value-neutral approach to the law eventually leads to distortions of the law. Lawyers will be left without a proper way to sense the purpose behind the law, and they will instead focus solely on what the law requires or allows. While law schools could choose from limitless lists of moral values to include in their curricula, this …

Teaching Professional Responsibility And Ethics, Ronald D. Rotunda

Ronald D. Rotunda

This article discusses the development of teaching legal ethics in light of the changes in the ethics rules over the years. The thesis is that many ethics rules reflect the needs of a cartel (the legal profession) to protect itself, rather than the need to protect the clients of lawyers. The author uses stories and examples to illustrate this thesis.