Legal Education Commons^™

Integrating "Alternative" Dispute Resolution Into Bankruptcy: As Simple (And Pure) As Motherhood And Apple Pie?, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Today, there can be little doubt that “alternative” dispute resolution is anything but alternative. Nonetheless, many judges, lawyers (and law students) do not truly understand the dispute resolution processes that are available and how they should be used. In the shadow of the current economic crisis, this lack of knowledge is likely to have negative consequences, particularly in those areas of practice such as bankruptcy and foreclosure in which clients, lawyers, regulators, and courts work under pressure, often with inadequate time and financial resources to permit careful analysis of procedural options. Potential negative effects can include: (1) impairment of a …

Lawyering In The Academy: The Intersection Of Academic Freedom And Professional Responsibility, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such …

Toward A Deeper Understanding Of Professionalism: Learning To Write And Writing To Learn During The First Two Weeks Of Law School, Ben Bratman

Articles

Law schools are under pressure to instill in their students a sense of professionalism, but what exactly does professionalism mean? And what can professors of legal writing do to lay an educational foundation of professionalism? They are, after all, the teachers who at most schools have the greatest interaction with the impressionable first-year students.

Professionalism is frequently used to mean a variety of behaviors that are important for lawyers to exhibit, but that are also important for those in business - outside the traditional professions - to exhibit. In the context of legal education, professionalism is better understood to mean …

Competent Legal Writing - A Lawyer's Professional Responsibility, Debra R. Cohen

Journal Articles

The legal profession is constantly evolving to keep pace with our increasingly complex society.' Today, the legal profession "is larger and more diverse than ever before." Despite this transformation, "the law has remained a single profession identified with a perceived common body of learning, skills and values." This common body of learning, skills, and values constitutes the fundamental elements of competent representation. Writing is one of the essential skills of competent representation.

"Law is a profession of words." Lawyers use words, both written and oral, in a wide array of contexts-to advise, to advocate, to elicit information, to establish legal …

From "Moral Stupidity" To Professional Responsibility, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Within the context-even, the challenge-presented by the first chapter of Seymour Wishman's book, Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer, we symposiasts have been invited to say something about the teaching of courses which in law school go under the titles, "Legal Ethics," "Professional Ethics," or "Professional Responsibility." This last is the
title of a two-credit course that I teach, in what I take to be a fairly traditional form, over the span of a semester at the University of Cincinnati. In this essay, I want to talk about the teaching of such a course; not about how I manage to teach …

Why Pro Bono In Law Schools, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ethos And Conscience—A Rejoinder, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

In “Wanted: An Ethos of Personal Responsibility,” Professor Kleinberger sought to prompt debate about the moral preconceptions of the legal profession. Professor Morawetz responded in his essay, “Layers and Conscience.” This article responds, commenting on Morawetz’s arguments that (1) excessive pessimism about lawyer morality is unfounded and counterproductive; (2) the public’s antipathy toward lawyers is inevitable given the role lawyers play in our society; (3) codes of ethics can and do have an uplifting influence on the morals of lawyers; and (4) law schools can and do train moral judgment.

Wanted: An Ethos Of Personal Responsibility—Why Codes Of Ethics And Schools Of Law Don't Make For Ethical Lawyers, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

This article: (1) argues that neither codes of professional ethics nor traditional modes of law school teaching do much to produce ethical lawyers; (2) asserts that ethics codes and the presuppositions of the adversary system work to alienate lawyers from a sense of individual responsibility; (3) critiques the conceptual connection between the adversary system and codes of lawyer ethics; (4) critiques the conventional approach to teaching legal ethics in law schools; (5) invokes the approach to ethical analysis championed by the German sociologist and social theorist Max Weber; and (6) explains how that approach, coupled with traditional tools of legal …

Artists, Workers, And The Law Of Work: Keynote Address, Howard Lesnick

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.