Law Commons^™

Teaching The Newly Essential Knowledge, Skills, And Values In A Changing World, Eliza Vorenberg, Cynthia F. Adcock, Eden E. Harrington, Elizabeth Kane, Lisa Bliss, Robin Boyle, Conrad Johnson, Susan Schechter, David Udell

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter of Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World has contributions from many authors:

• Section A, Professional Identity Formation, includes:
  • Teaching Knowledge, Skills, and Values of Professional Identity Formation, by Larry O. Natt Gantt, II & Benjamin V. Madison III,
  • Integrating Professionalism into Doctrinally-Focused Courses, by Paula Schaefer,
  • Learning Professional Responsibility, by Clark D. Cunningham, and
  • Teaching Leadership, by Deborah L. Rhode.
• Section B, Pro Bono as a Professional Value, is by Cynthia F. Adcock, Eden E. Harrington, Elizabeth Kane, Susan Schechter, David S. Udell & Eliza Vorenberg.
• Section C, The Relational Skills of the …

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …

The Challenges Of Developing Cross-Cultural Legal Ethics Education, Professional Development, And Guidance For The Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The broad goal of this paper is to describe the need, and provide a framework, for engaging in cross-cultural conversations among lawyers, law teachers, and others, who are using legal ethics as a vehicle for improving the legal professions and the delivery of legal services. All legal cultures struggle with the question of how to educate students and lawyers to be ethical professionals and how to regulate the legal profession effectively. The purpose of the cross-cultural conversations discussed in this paper would be to develop principles of legal ethics education, professional development, and regulation of the legal professions that can …

The Ethics Teacher's Bittersweet Revenge: Virtue And Risk Management, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Insurance companies have come to play a role in professional responsibility compliance that rivals that of courts and disciplinary agencies. The insurers, however, depart from the judicial perspective of the traditional enforcement agencies. Instead, they take the risk management perspective that Anthony Alfieri describes.

I agree with Alfieri that risk management poses real dangers of cynicism and Babbittry. Nevertheless, I also see more upside than he does. The new perspective is valuable, not just as a strategy for attracting student attention, but as an antidote to real and basic deficiencies in mainstream ethics teaching and traditional professional practice. In this …

Comment On Moliterno, Legal Education, Experiential Education, And Professional Responsibility, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In attempting to predict and prescribe the future, my vision of the recent history of legal education differs from Professor Moliterno's in certain relevant ways.

I graduated from Law School in 1967. I learned largely through doctrinal courses that delivered steady training in thinking like a lawyer and information about areas of law. These courses exposed me and my classmates to legal lingo and to the standard types of legal arguments. We learned, largely by hearing the teacher and our fellow students, to make verbal moves and to see the strengths and limitations of others' argumentation skills and techniques. We …

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …

The Trouble With Legal Ethics, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Legal ethics is a disappointing subject. From afar, it seems exciting; it promises to engage the central normative commitments that make lawyering a profession and that account for much of the nonpecuniary appeal of the lawyer's role. Thus, when people see public spirit among lawyers threatened by commercial self-seeking, they often prescribe increased attention to the teaching and -discussion of legal ethics as a remedy.

But close up, legal ethics usually turns out to be dull and dispiriting. At most law schools, students find the course in legal ethics or professional responsibility boring and insubstantial, and faculty dread having to …

Ethical Discretion In Lawyering, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Simon argues that conventional approaches to legal ethics are too categorical. Rather than operating within a system of formalized ethical rules, he argues, lawyers should exercise judgment and discretion in deciding what clients to represent and how to represent them. In exercising this discretion, lawyers should seek to "do justice." They should consider the merits of the client's claims and goals relative to those of opposing parties and other potential clients. They should also consider the substantive merits of the client's claims and the reliability of the standard legal procedures for resolving the problem at hand. …