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A full-fledged course in legal ethics/professional responsibility is now generally required of 2nd or 3rd year law students at most American law schools. West Virginia, in contrast to most law schools, has made the course a part of the first year curriculum. The legal ethics course belongs in the first year (and ideally, additional ethics courses in each succeeding year). We have, at West Virginia, located the legal ethics course where it might assume a place of real importance. (The fact that it has not become an "important" course is another story.) When law teachers first turned their attention to a required legal ethics course, they were faced with a choice: teaching legal ethics as a law course or as an ethics course. The outcome was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Today, legal ethics and professional responsibility courses focus almost exclusively on the "rules" of lawyer ethics and the law of lawyering. (Every state has adopted a set of rules to govern lawyering conduct. A majority of states, including West Virginia, follow rules modeled on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct.) Law teachers, mistakenly assume that if there is to be a single required ethics course it should focus on the profession's ethical rules. Consequently, law teachers have envisioned legal ethics as a branch of law; lawyer ethics as been transmuted into the law of lawyering. The teaching of legal ethics and professional responsibility could have taken a different path. Law teachers might have taken note of a simple fact: rule-following is only one aspect, and by no means the most significant, of a lawyer's ethical conduct. Indeed, such a recognition would simply have been an extension of the idea that the practice of law itself is always more than knowing and applying rules. Scholars of moral philosophy and legal ethics teachers agree that an ethics devoted to rules is an impoverished ethics. This scholarly consensus on the limited role of ethical rules in moral conduct -- being a "good" lawyer -- has not, however, been adequately taken into account in the design and teaching of legal ethics and professional responsibility courses in American law schools. I taught the required professional responsibility/legal ethics course for fifteen years. In all those years, I was constantly plagued by the conflicting pull of law (the law of lawyering) and ethics (which invites examination of the underlying moral and philosophical dimensions of lawyer work). In the traditional legal ethics course, students and I were caught up and battered about by conflicting visions of ethics, the limited vision of legal ethics that focuses on ethical rules and a vision of ethics conceived as an exploration of the moral sentiments and concerns interwoven in the everyday affairs of a legal practice and a lawyer's life. As I began to make this tension between legal thinking and moral discourse a part of the legal ethics course, I found that the course took on a life of its own -- instructive and educational for some, a source of anger and discomfort for others (including more than one Dean). I found that while students have no great affection for the traditional rule-based approach to legal ethics (indeed, the course has historically been viewed with disdain by law students), many found my effort to teach lawyer ethics as ethics objectionable. We traded the tedium of the conventional study of ethical rules for the anxiety that accompanies a first-hand experience of the moral undertow in the lawyer work. Obviously, not everyone experienced anxiety or would have opted, given the choice, to have taken the more traditional course of legal ethics study. There are always students who express concern about the moral dimensions of legal work and some are deeply troubled by the moral world they are about to enter. It is the concern of these students and the openness and curiosity of still others that makes a real lawyer ethics course possible.  Home
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