Prof. Michelle Harner shares over at Concurring Opinions,
We started our spring semester today at Maryland, and I am teaching one of my favorite courses, Legal Profession. Having faced ethical dilemmas in practice (and unfortunately seen very talented lawyers disciplined, disbarred and jailed), I believe that this course is extremely valuable. I suspect, however, that most of our students disagree with me, which is why they typically wait until the last semester of law school to take this required course. In fact, the very first time I taught Legal Profession, I asked my class of 75 3Ls to raise their hands if they would “elect†to take Legal Profession if it was not required for graduation. Only one student raised her hand; I promptly commented that she was perhaps the smartest woman in the room. Since that first year, more students have raised their hands, but I attribute at least part of that increase to a note in prior students’ outlines to “raise hand when Prof. Harner asks . . . .â€
Are professional ethics courses useful in law school? Are these better relegated to the bar admissions process and learning on the job? Or is it too late by that time given the pressures lawyers face, as Prof. Harner suggests?
I have tried to extract some profound words by
The Hon Justice Michael Kirby speech a few years ago he wrote:Teaching legal ethics: The revival of the public debate about what legal professional ethics should be, and the heart-searching within the legal profession itself, signalled by this occasion, make it timely to urge an intensified interest in law schools in the teaching of legal ethics. This is not just a rudimentary training in the provisions of the local professional statute, rules of etiquette and, where applicable, book-keeping and trust account requirements, offered in a few lectures thrown in at the end of the law course. It is a matter of infusing all law teaching with a consideration of the ethical quandaries that can be presented to lawyers in the course of their professional lives. Only in this way will law schools provide students with guidance on the professional responsibility and on the ethical issues they will face as they enter the profession. One commentator has remarked, rightly in my view:
“[Law teachers] cannot avoid teaching ethics. By the very act of teaching, law teachers embody lawyering and the conduct of legal professionals. We create images of law and lawyering when we teach doctrine through cases and hypotheticals”.
Professor Ross Cranston in his book Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility accepts that the technical rules can be left to the practice course but asserts that:
“… all law teachers have a responsibility to give attention to the ethical under-pinnings of legal practice. We have a responsibility to sensitise students to the ethical problems they will face as practitioners to provide them with some assistance in the task of resolving these problems, and to expose them to wider issues such as the unmet need for legal services” In a time when so many fundamentals are questioned, doubted, even rejected, it is hardly surprising that the ethics of the legal profession should also be doubted by some of its members and attacked by its critics. It is easier to adopt a purely economic or mercantile view of the law if you have no concept of the nobility of the search for individual justice, of the essential dignity of each human being and the vital necessity of providing the law’s protection, particularly to minorities, those who are hated, even demonized, and reviled. Without some kind of spiritual foundation for our society we can do little else than to reach back into the collective memory of our religious past or to rely on consensus declarations as to contemporary human values.