Ethics

David Hricik's post encouraged some reminiscing about how this blog got started.  But an equally interesting question is how we all came to study (or practice in the field of) legal ethics in the first place.  For many of us, I suspect that it was serendipitous and that (like so much else in life) it wasn't really planned.  For what it's worth, here is my story... 

Basically, I got started in legal ethics because of Brad Wendel.  Brad preceded me by two years as an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and was a gracious host as I was interviewing for the program.  During my visit, Brad told me that he was focusing his scholarship on legal ethics and that he had landed a job at Washington & Lee. 

I hadn't given legal ethics much thought and had originally intended to do some writing on employment discriminiation issues.  But I had taken ethics-related courses in college and found them to be fun and intellectually challenging.  Moreover, I had heard that law schools often looked to hire people to teach legal ethics and that not a lot of people were interested in teaching it.  In other words, legal ethics was both interesting and happened to fit a market need.  Whether the "market need" piece was (or still is) empicially true, I don't know.  But my decision was, at least in part, based on it. 

Fortunately, I've discovered that the field is much more interesting and rewarding than I could have imagined back then, but my entry into the field was truly serendipitous.  So here's a public thanks to Brad Wendel for unknowingly encouraging an aspiring academic to get into this wonderful field, which also happens to be full of so many terrific and supportive people.

How about other readers?  What's your story?