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Full-Text Articles in Law
Teaching Ethics In An Atmosphere Of Skepticism And Relativism, W. Bradley Wendel
Teaching Ethics In An Atmosphere Of Skepticism And Relativism, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
I would like to do several things in this essay. First, I am interested in the sources of students' wariness about moral reasoning and claims about objectivity and truth in ethics. Sometimes I feel like a teacher of geography who must confront a deeply entrenched belief that the earth is flat. The earth is not flat, nor is ethics just a matter of opinion, but one wonders why students persist in thinking the opposite. Teaching effectively requires an understanding of where students are coming from. Accordingly, the opening section of this essay is structured around a series of hypotheses to …
Ethics For Skeptics, W. Bradley Wendel
Ethics For Skeptics, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
One of the themes of the 2002 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS") has been that we, as teachers, must do better at engaging our students "where they're at." A number of speakers on various panels addressed the consumerist mentality among students, the desire of a population raised on MTV for multimedia lectures that resemble rapidly paced entertainment with high production values, and the suspicion of students toward claims of authority by teachers that are not backed up by respect and hard work. In addition, I would add a further observation as a teacher of ethics …
Legal Ethics Must Be The Heart Of The Law School Curriculum Symposium: Recommitting To Teaching Legal Ethics- Shaping Our Teaching In A Changing World, Russell G. Pearce
Legal Ethics Must Be The Heart Of The Law School Curriculum Symposium: Recommitting To Teaching Legal Ethics- Shaping Our Teaching In A Changing World, Russell G. Pearce
Faculty Scholarship
Despite what seems to be far greater attention paid to the teaching of legal ethics than to any other law school subject, legal ethics remains no better than a second class subject in the eyes of students and faculty. This essay suggests that all efforts at innovation in legal ethics teaching are doomed to a marginal impact at best. Only recognition that legal ethics is the most important subject in the law school curriculum will lead to real and significant changes in the teaching of legal ethics. If the commitment of the legal profession and of legal academia to producing …
A Midrash On Rabbi Shaffer And Rabbi Trollope, David Luban
A Midrash On Rabbi Shaffer And Rabbi Trollope, David Luban
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who' wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as "left of center," Shaffer is a complex …
Using The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Legal Ethics In A Property Course, Thomas L. Shaffer
Using The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Legal Ethics In A Property Course, Thomas L. Shaffer
Journal Articles
The first-year introductory course in property law is about all that is left of the traditional black-box curriculum. It is where beginning law students cope with and despair of the arcana of English common law; where, with more detachment than, say, in the torts course, analysis of appellate opinions is what "thinking like a lawyer" means, with no more than peripheral and begrudging attention to modem legislation and administrative law; where legal reasoning is a stretching exercise and initiatory discipline. And, incidentally, surviving bravely the rude invasion of teachers of public law, it is where a teaching lawyer can point …