Ethics

I take it as a very good sign for the direction of legal education that UC-Irvine's new law school is requiring its entering students to take an interdisciplinary course exploring the lawyer's role.  Here's the description:

Law 507A - Legal Profession I (2 units)

This course, which will be part of both semesters, is designed to prepare students to chart rewarding and responsible careers in law. Drawing from various disciplines, including economics, history, sociology, and psychology, we will teach students about the variety of practice settings in which lawyers work and the professional opportunities and challenges of each. Among the practice settings we will consider are small, medium, and large firms, prosecutors' offices, public defender organizations, corporate counsel offices, nonprofit advocacy groups, legal aid, and the judiciary. We will consider ethical dilemmas that lawyers confront in each of these settings and survey some of the law that governs lawyers and that is particularly salient in each practice type. We will convene panels of lawyers from each type of practice to talk about their work and careers, the pressures they face, how they resolve such dilemmas, and where they find satisfaction. Students will participate in role-playing exercises based on typical problems confronted in practice. The course will also address larger issues facing the profession as a whole ? including the legal services market and its regulation, the distribution of legal services, the profession's demographics, social structure, and working conditions, and the implications of globalization for the profession.

I teach a required first-year course at St. Thomas titled "Foundations of Justice."  Here is the description:

This course introduces students to the foundational moral commitments shaping both the structure of our system of justice and the multiple roles of the lawyer in administering that system.  Each line of inquiry is explored through both Catholic texts and texts from other religious or philosophical traditions, and by examining the multiple roles of the lawyer ? as advocate for powerless or powerful clients, as policy-maker, as judge, as voter, as community member, and as family member.  The course is designed to give students tools for discerning and articulating the moral dimension of legal practice, and to provide a common vocabulary for continued consideration of this dimension in the remainder of their law school courses.  

Our course, not surprisingly, has a religious emphasis that Irvine's lacks, but I think both courses represent an increasing awareness that students need to be equipped to think deeply about their professional roles in terms that transcend the Model Rules, and that draw insight from other fields regarding fundamental questions of justice, ethics, and even human nature.  And perhaps even more significantly, the courses reflect a recognition that these issues need to be placed squarely on students' radar screens from the beginning of law school.  I know that a few other schools do something like this, but I don't know how widespread this practice will become; it's easier for new schools to innovate with the first year curriculum, in part, no doubt, because no one's ox is being gored when we make space for a new approach.