Legal History Commons^™

Ethics As Self-Transcendence: Legal Education, Faith, And An Ethos Of Justice, Patrick Brown

Seattle University Law Review

Ethics is fundamentally about ethos, attitude, one's grounded stance or existential orientation, not the extrinsicism of concepts or the formalism of rules. Ethics concerns not just any orientation, but that intimate and demanding form of personal development manifested in the experience and practice of self-transcendence. Conversely, the neglect of ethics as self-transcendence introduces deep distortions into the way we socialize students into notions of ethics and professionalism. It introduces subsequent distortions into the conditions of legal practice. It encourages a superficial and extrinsic minimalism. It encourages, in effect, the disastrous conception of legal ethics as ethical legalism. I begin by …