Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers is not a philosophy course of the kind found in most philosophy departments. The course readings are drawn from novels and lawyer autobiographies, as well as other literary and social science sources. There is little in the way of traditional philosophical texts. Consequently, we will not study legal or moral philosophers and their philosophical schools but rather focus on ethics as conversation. We will try to talk about:

ethics and puzzle over the moral dimension of our lives as lawyers;

the metaphors, images, stories, and myths (as well as the clichés and conventions) that find their way into our conversations about lawyers and their work;

the sources of moral guidance in professional life (reflecting on the limited role of ethical rules, which ironically, constitutes the only course in legal ethics most law students ever take).

Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers offers an opportunity to explore the following questions:

Do we have the ethics we need as lawyers, and if we don't, how are we going to know, learn, find, or create an ethics of lawyering that honors the best of what we want a life in law to represent?

What obstacles (personal and social) impede our understanding of the moral dimension of lawyering?

How are we to understand the serious moral failures we see taking place in the legal profession? How and why does a traditional lawyer ethic that focuses on zealous advocacy become morally problematic?

The course begins and ends with a simple question: can a good lawyer be a good person? I think the answer is yes, but the path for getting to yes is filled with pot-holes and detours.

 Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers is a course of reading and reflective exercises that focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of a life in law. We know that law plays a significant role in American society, politics, and culture and is both a powerful intellectual perspective and social tool. It is a prospective, a tool, and a power that students come to law school to acquire. In law school, law teachers claim with great pride to teach, not just law, but how "to think a lawyer." What does it mean to give your mind over to this way of thinking? To use the powerful rhetorical tools that lawyers learn to command? In Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers we'll try to reflect on what it means to become a lawyer and how law work affects one's character and moral perspective.

Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers, by way of the course title, suggest that our philosophical work is to be of practical value. For some, it may seem odd and a bit late to be talking philosophy in law school. It's odd because law students haven't set out to be philosopher's, indeed most have no great love of philosophy. While there are ample reasons to be skeptical about philosophy, it is a skepticism that should be examined and questioned. Philosophy, when it honors Socrates, may not be the bad tasting medicine we had imagined it.

So, what is this philosophy we undertake here?

Philosophy raises questions and it is questions about the legal profession and our practices as lawyers that we will pursue. What kind of philosophy do we embrace and enact when we become lawyers? Or put somewhat differently, how does being a lawyer change your philosophy? What kind of ethic and ethics do we take on when we become lawyers? How does lawyer ethics work and how does our profession's thinking about lawyer ethics lead us astray? What kind of conflicts between conventional lawyer ethics and ordinary morality can a lawyer be expected to experience? How are we, as a profession, to address the maladies induced by the conflicts we experience as a lawyer? (Or should they be left to infect us in whatever way they will, each individual to figure out a healing response?) What metaphors, images, stories, and myths about lawyering do we uncover as we study our philosophy as lawyers? How do the most practical among us talk about lawyering? There are two basic questions that philosophical discussion makes transparent: (I) Do we have the ethics, we need as lawyers, and if we don't, how are we going to address the gap between the ideals we (and law) represent and the ethics of practicing lawyers? (ii) Can a good lawyer be a good person?

Philosophy calls for reflection and introspection. We need to reflect on the ethics of lawyers, the ethics that embodies and distinguishes our own character, and the ethics we hear in the speech of those who talk about ethics.

A philosophical perspective encourages an informed, searching critique of the adversarial ethic. How does the adversarial ethic and belief in zealous representation, and the work that accompanies the lawyer ethic shape (and deform) the character of those who make a life of such work? If the adversarial ethic and zealous advocacy advance the interests of clients and ignore other values, interest, and community, what is the costs to the lawyer?

We can study the conventions and practices of lawyers and subject them to moral scrutiny. We can ask: is this practice good? What harm is incurred when this practice is used indiscriminately? How do we defend a questionable practice? How can we ever get beyond our defenses and self- serving rationalizations? A proper study of lawyering practices must include the moral concerns raised about the practices we adopt, even those historically "accepted," perhaps even those practices which are permitted y our present ethical rules. (Ethical rules can no more proscribe all questionable conduct as can the compliance with all ethical rules make you an ethical person.)

We might assume that it is of immediate concern to the practical lawyer that our ethics as lawyers are held in disdain by the public (and made the subject of ridicule in lawyer jokes and lawyer cartons). A practical but wise lawyer recognizes as foolish the lawyer who says, "I have no concern about the public perception of lawyer ethics," knowing him to be in the position of the businessman who says "I'm a businessman and don't have time or inclination to worry about the economy." We know that the general public has expressed concern about the legal profession which raises questions for the practicing bar (and bench) who describe the present situation as a "crises" in the profession. For others, less prone to crises talk, the structural and economic changes in law firm practice, and decline in civility between lawyers is also of concern. Practicing lawyers without a thought of philosophy, worry about these matters.

Philosophy informs our study of the virtue and character of lawyers and of those who push the adversarial ethic beyond the bounds of "ordinary morality." Philosophy helps us evaluate the claim that personal morals and lawyer ethics can be compartmentalized.

Philosophy as we imagine it here is the philosophy you bring with you and the philosophies we encounter when we think, talk, and act like lawyers. By sticking to philosophy close to home, and to our own lives, we focus attention on the value, quality, and meaning of lawyer work as you have learned it during the course of your legal education (and that you brought with you to law school).

In Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers we want to keep our focus on lawyer work, the choices lawyers make in doing this work, and the character established by the repertoire of a lawyer's choices over time. You may take further solace in the fact that it is not philosophy a subject of study we are about, but our philosophy of work, of professional life, of the persons who take up professional work as their life. The only philosophy we need consider is that which we discover in our labors and our conversations. I assume that you, as well as I, will constantly ask: Is the philosophy we are doing here accessible, understandable, valuable, practical? There is nothing sacred in the word philosophy that requires head bowed reverence. Some of us may simply want to think well, live a respectable life, practice law, and look after our families. If it's possible to be a good lawyer and a good person by ignoring moral and philosophical questions, so be it. We may indeed find it possible to do all the good we want to do and be the persons we want to be and never use the word philosophy or think of philosophy again. If so, let it be.

As powerful as legal thinking and the lawyer ethic may be, when allowed to dominate our thinking and our lives we are at some peril. No ethic, as no virtue, can be practiced to the exclusion of all else. Virtues, overdetermined, become vices. An ethic which has the power to push aside all its competitors is dangerous as well as powerful. We soften and contextualize the rigid demands and felt necessities of an ethic by seeing it through the prism of the metaphors and images that accompany it. The lawyer ethic is not a single script, a rigidly prescribed role, or a unitary world view. As my friend Charma from the small island of Sumba, Indonesia, a place where the old animist beliefs are still practiced, tells me, "there are many ways to the heaven." Consequently, were are all, always, trying to imagine ourselves as lawyers and there are metaphors aplenty by which we buckle down and assume the most conventional roles with a psyche that traffics in the most limited of images. An extended study of lawyer ethics allows us to seek out the images and metaphors with which we describe ourselves and our work, scrutinize the empty and vacuous, and consider new more vital replacements.

Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers is, most simply put, an alternative legal ethics course. It is a course of study, reading, and reflection that insures that our legalistic perspective does not diminish our study of ethics. A course in lawyer ethics should honor ethics. A course that honors ethics will honor philosophy. Since most legal ethics courses honor law more than they honor ethics, we need courses that attempt to deal confront legalism with a perspective equally powerful, ethics and philosophy constitute such a perspective. To honor ethics we need not praise ethics and philosophy, or become philosophy students, We honor ethics and philosophy by our conversation, questions, reflections, and arguments.

(Every subject, ethics and philosophy, as well as law, are honored by being questioned: What is this subject? How does it work? How does it allow me to talk? What kind of claims can be made in the name of this subject? What demands does it make upon the student?)

Many law students have convinced themselves (without fully considering their conviction) that they can live without philosophy and that the legal profession is just the place to do it. We certainly don't make any effort to screen out those who are disdainful of philosophy and bar their admission to law schools, indeed, they are made welcome. We make welcome those who are suspicious about philosophy because we are reasonably assured that the study of law contains within its borders a great deal of philosophy, that no student can become a lawyer without seeing the play of jurisprudence just off center stage (even as it sometimes upstages the parties and their efforts to resolve a dispute). Law is so thoroughly entwined with philosophy, history, sociology (and other disciplines) that we expect the student to see and understand that everything they have learned and know can be brought to bear on one's efforts as a lawyer. Students learn along the way that lawyers bring much to their work that is simply not taught in law school. (And yes, it's true that we send exactly the opposite message in the first years of a student's legal education.) So, even the most practical-minded and philosophy suspicious student is expected to learn a fair amount of philosophy and to think (even if in a crude way) like a philosopher in order to be an effective lawyer. Philosophy need not travel under the banner of philosophy to be philosophy.

The best way to make philosophy attractive to those who are philosophically agnostic is rather simple--make them part of the conversation. We do so, for several reasons: I) they are colleagues and we work with them as fellow members of the legal profession; ii) they may have interesting things to say and turn out to be interesting people; iii) the suspicions and doubts about philosophy may provide a valuable source of information how lawyer ethics works and the obstacles we face in being good lawyers and good persons; iv) those who are suspicious of philosophy may be rightfully disdainful of the academic, scholastic, analytical philosophy which has been handed down to us in the universities; v) the anti-philosophy stance does not mean that individuals are not curious about their own philosophies and how they work; vi) suspicions about philosophy may (even though it often does not) signal one's humility in learning and teaching virtue; vii) those who are suspicious about philosophy and proclaim to have a practical orientation may still have the highest regard for the legal profession and the standards by which lawyers conduct themselves; and viii) they may turn out to be better human beings than those of us who hold ourselves as to be friends of philosophy.

While I've focused attention on those who are suspicious about philosophy and whose practical orientation make them philosophy shy, we should also be mindful of the law students eager to take up philosophical questions and engage in serious reflective work on lawyer ethics. While we welcome those who are suspicions of philosophy (and their efforts to question the viability of moral discourse in legal education), we must also honor those who want to study law as a moral and ethical discipline.

One way we honor the philosophically inclined is to take seriously their "big questions": How is it that the more we punish criminals the more criminals we seem to have? What does it mean to say that the punishment should fit the crime? How can the law have about it any certainty when it is always undergoing change? How are we to read and interpret a contract in a way that honors the "real agreement" reached by the parties? Judges claim to be "objective," but in what sense is their claim overstated? How can we read a judicial opinion so as extract the "rule of law" embedded in the case? Is not in just such questions that the student open to philosophy, who just happens to be sitting beside a fellow student who finds such questions intrusive and unnecessary, that we begin to imagine philosophy as a struggle, a contest between those who welcome such questions and those who view them as a waste of time.

When philosophy makes an appearance, however it may happen, by the invitation of a philosophically inclined teacher, or the intrusive efforts of a student who has questions about "justice," or "women's issues," or the narrow way that law is so often taught, decisions must be made about how to proceed. How will the philosophical questions be received? How will they be resisted? How do those who resist philosophy and those with who deem it necessary for lawyers to have a philosophical sensibility find it possible to carry on a conversation? I know of no more spirited conversation in legal education than that between students of a professor in a first year or required course law school course who thought to "too philosophical" and does not teach the "practical" stuff and those who find the philosophical perspective a welcome relief. The argument over how philosophical a course should be is, it seems, always an argument between the "few" and the "many" and it will not be hard to guess that it is the few who support a philosophical orientation.

Philosophy, welcome by some, scorned by others, offers an approach, perspective, method(s), and a host of questions. Will philosophy be acknowledged or ridiculed? It is certainly true that philosophy's appearance is often unwanted and unwelcome, and to some, threatening. In the struggle between those who would set a place for philosophy at the table and those who would not, we have the terrain on which lawyer work and lawyer ethics is to understood and contested. In the arguments between the philosopher welcomers and the philosopher banishers there is much to be learned. Should we welcome and celebrate philosophy or avoid it as a troublesome, annoying, and perplexing subject that offers little but anxiety and the confusion of questions with no answers.

Law school, conventionally imagined, is a place where training in skills takes place, where one learns what law is and how it is used on behalf of clients. Law school, as it turns out, is also training in an ethic that shapes one's character. Autobiographical accounts of legal education suggest that law school is more than learning rules, gaining skills, and practicing legal strategies for problem-solving; a study of law seems to have the power to reorder the images and moral sentiments we carry with us into the practice of law. Legal education, for better and worse, changes the way we think about the world. The power of legal thinking should not be underestimated.

Lawyer ethics, as envisioned here, proceeds on a simple premise: we must think about ethics, talk ethics with our colleagues, and find a way to engage in public discourse about the moral quality and character of professional life. We must, against the odds and at some cost, make time and a place to carry on this conversation about lawyer ethics. Yet, there is no guarantee that talking about the morals and ethics of lawyers, under the best of conditions, will produce a new generation of civic-minded lawyers. There are many, with all manner of reasons and motivations, who view the teaching of lawyer ethics as a misguided and futile effort at moral improvement. If by ethics we mean anything more than the ethical rules of the profession, no teaching is possible, or so say the cynics. I proceed on a modestly contrary assumption: we must teach ethics, if only to learn from failure.

There are obstacles to a serious ethics conversation and these obstacles must be confronted. If we are limited and constrained in our efforts to engage in ethical inquiry, then we must know what these constraints are, how they work, and make these obstacles themselves subject to inquiry and conversation. If our conversations about ethics are to be meaningful, we must recognize and work with the obstacles to moral inquiry and moral reflection. I assume that suspicions and skepticism will be present in any ethics conversation and that these stances, as others, must be confronted.

The confrontation with the obstacles to moral discourse and the ensuing engagement with lawyer ethics may create a variety of entanglements, discomforts, and anxieties along the way. Our conversations are likely to expose substantial disagreements about what it means to be an ethical lawyer, and an ethical person, and even how the most basic of ethical sensibilities are to be made a part of our professional lives. If no one of us can know exactly what ethics is, or what we are bound by ethics to do and who our ethical lawyers are, perhaps we may still agree that ethics presents an array of open-ended questions, competing images, conflicting sentiments and demands that are interesting enough to make an extended conversation about ethics worthwhile.

When we focus on lawyer ethics as moral discourse we do not motor in the smooth waters of secluded harbors. When we articulate our positions on ethical matters in the law school classroom or in response to the questions and concerns posed in conversation with each other, we expose the rough edges of our moral thinking and make ourselves and our imagined roles as lawyers vulnerable (a vulnerability that many want neither to admit or experience). While most law students would agree that lawyers need to be ethical in the practice of law, the question is whether we can tolerate the conversation, inquiry, and vulnerability necessary to determine what ethical sensibilities and sentiments we already have and how we might develop the resources that will strengthen our moral resolve.

We begin our study of lawyer ethics by exploring the moral implications in our assumptions about teaching and learning ethics. For example, students of lawyer ethics assume:

• that we get our moral and ethical values while growing up; and as such, our ethics is not subject to significant change as adults;
• that since we already have our ethics (we bring them to law school with us), there is essentially nothing to study, nothing to learn about ethics in law school;
• that ethics, whatever else it might be, is personal and subjective (in contrast to law which is viewed as more objective and public);
• that virtue (goodness, wise use of a skill), whatever one's view of ethics, cannot be taught but is a matter of personality and basic human nature.

It is assumptions such as they we must confront and explore; our assumptions shape how we educate and imagine ourselves as lawyers.

A student of lawyer ethics needs an opportunity to explore their assumptions about ethics and how these assumptions implicate and entangle and impoverish the ideals and images of lawyer we take with us into the practice of law. The purpose of moral discourse with colleagues is to puzzle out what it means to have, educate, develop, and cultivate ethical sensibilities.

We need to examine the moral scripts we carry into the study and practice of law. We need to know what these scripts are and the assumptions embedded in them and the effect the scripts and assumptions might have on our lawyering. Unless we become more conscious of the images, metaphors, and conventions that appear in the scripted roles we adopt as lawyers, lawyer ethics will be relegated to the study of ethical rules and the law of lawyering. Working with these "agenda scripts," we learn to recognize and question the voice, persona, character, and moral sentiments, we take up and enact as lawyers. Our "agenda scripts" are of crucial importance as they provide the push and pull, the ebb and flow, of our moral lives.

In lawyer ethics, we find a pantheon of strong warning voices, conventional views and scripts, stereotypical arguments, and finally, those who in their silence leave us to guess what they may be thinking about ethics. Consider the following: There is a skeptical or cynical voice that says "ethics does not matter." This voice is quietly confirmed by those who contend that if ethics matters, "it matters only as a set of rules" (a view of ethics that focuses on bottom-line constraints, making lawyers, like catfish, ethical bottom-feeders). A second voice, in awkward alliance with the skeptics asserts that if ethics matters, "it is only as a matter of personal conscience" (and has no place in the classroom). Still another voice admits ethics matters, but fears that ethics matters so little to some (those with whom we compete and practice law) that "no lawyer can afford to adopt an ethic(s) that might put her (or her client) at a competitive disadvantage." Another voice, knowingly and shrilling warns: "don't let ethics make you the fool (read: dreamer, idealist, utopian)."

We need to know more about these ethical agendas and the voices in which they are pronounced and how they are used to justify and promote particular views about lawyer ethics. The most stereotypical, scripted of these "voices" should be confronted and made a subject for study in lawyer ethics courses. If these agendas and voices influence our ethics, our work, and our lives, as they surely do, then we should be able to identify them and evaluate them. We may find some of these agendas and voices are more constructive than others. We may find that some, which appear to be benign and honored by tradition, are simply cliched stereotypes that lead to self-deception and pathologies of professional character (fragmentation, compartmentalization, rationalization, projection, denial) that are morally problematic and psychologically unhealthy.

To see clearly one's own moral outlook is not easy. Indeed, even to begin to actively explore a moral outlook can be disquieting. Seymour Wishman's autobiography of his years as a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer (New York: Penguin, 1982), begins with a detailed explanation of how he adopted a legal persona which shielded him from the moral dimension of his work as a lawyer. Wishman, embodying the zealousness we have came to expect of trial lawyers, begins to doubt the wisdom of adversarial zeal as a cornerstone of his own moral character. Wishman challenges the macho zealotry of adversarialism and calls into question the traditional paradigm of the lawyer as partisan advocate and willing hired-gun who abandons ordinary morality and substitutes a lawyer adversarial ethic.

Some in the legal profession would have lawyers adopt the ethic of prize fighters whose singular purpose is to beat an opponent senseless. This school of thought was captured in Charles Curtis's statement that lawyers "must be not only our friends. They must be our champions. For the way we administer justice is by an adversary proceeding, which is as much as to say, we set the parties fighting." [Charles P. Curtis, It's Your Law 1 (1954)]. The prize fighter ethic, allied with the metaphor of law as war, imagines trials as battles. The image of the lawyer as prize fighter or hired-gun appeals to many lawyers and students of law. A lawyer devotee of adversarial zealotry tends to overlook Louis Nizer's admonition that: "A trial...is more than the thumping excitement of contest, where the weapons are words and the defenses are wits. It is the search for truth. Diogenes and his lantern might well constitute a symbolic replacement for the blindfolded figure of Justice." [Louis Nizer, My Life in Court 7-8 (1961)].

In contrast to prizefighter and hired-gun there are other images of the lawyer that evoke other ideals. For example, Thomas Shaffer has argued for a reconsideration of the gentlemen as both image and oasis for a lawyering ethic. The "gentleman" lawyer (with all its cultural and gender baggage) is certainly an interesting alternative to the lawyer as "hired gun." Consequently, we might study the most famous of gentleman lawyers, albeit a fictional one, Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). We can test what we learn of Atticus and the "gentleman" lawyer ideal against the realities of contemporary legal practice. We may find that the gentleman ideal has no place in modern-day practice of law and that Atticus is best studied as a nostalgic character as a part of the history of the legal profession. And then, we may find that it is still the "gentleman" ethic to which some of us aspire.

I find Wishman's "reservations" about the lawyer ethic and ethics (and many of us have them) too fundamental and philosophically instructive, to simply shunt aside and ignore. The idea is that we might learn something from each other, those who have "reservations" and those who don't. We can, with practice and patience, begin to listen to each other, listen for and try to learn to identify the agendas, voices, sentiment, and character and that appear and sound in lawyer ethics talk. The adversarial ethic holds out great promise, but within it we find a world of conflicting ideals and dreams, different and competing visions of an ethical world.

In lawyer ethics talk about agendas, voices, sentiments, character and persona, we explore the ideals embedded in professionalism while taking stock of conventional justifications offered for unbounded adversarial zeal. Do the ideals we associate with the legal profession (and with professionalism, more generally) confer special powers, and if so, what costs are attendant to the acquisition and exercise of these powers? The psychiatrist, Robert Coles, tells of a conversation with activist Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, where he commented to Berrigan that lawyers and other professionals "manage quite successfully to come to terms with the powers that be, and never once start asking themselves what assumptions they have made every day about where their money comes from, who pays them, who rewards them, whom they don't see as...clients, whom they never get to represent--who cannot purchase their time." [Robert Coles, The Geography of Faith: Conversations Between Daniel Berrigan 99 (1971)].

In Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers, you are invited to take part in a conversation, to consider moral matters that weigh on lawyering and professional identity, a philosophical inquiry into what we become when we become lawyers. This is an invitation, to use more formal terms, to engage in moral discourse, to engage colleagues in conversation about the promise and pitfalls of a life in which harm to others is possible, a life of service in which we work with those who have been harmed or suffered wrongdoing and hope to secure redress and justice. To discourse, according to the dictionary, is to move around, to take a stance, to evoke a tone, to elicit thought, to speak of that which matters. We might imagine lawyer ethics discourse, movement, stance-taking, listening for tones and undercurrents and assumptions present in the everyday world of conventional thoughts and expressions. Moral discourse is, most simply state, a conversation about matters of singular importance.

There are many who are skeptical about public discourse on ethical matters and see little value in it. But there is an irony in this notion that we cannot speak openly and reflectively about moral concerns. Silence seems foreign and contrary to the spirit of the legal persona. We spend much of our professional lives speaking on behalf of others, articulating their causes and concerns; how can we remain silent on matters bearing most directly on how we choose to hold ourselves out to the world?

There is no royal road to ethical discernment, no authoritatively prescribed place to begin one's education as an ethical lawyer. Consequently, there are many places one might begin, many "first" texts and possible openings for conversation. We begin not at some mythic beginning but at where we are now, along the way. There is an order to what we do but not an indispensable one. In a theoretical sense, each Reading, Exercise, and new day of conversation constitutes a beginning (and in an ideal world, no beginning would be accorded privileged status as the true beginning) and suggest questions we might pursue.

In ethics, as in everyday life, we begin where we are, and figure out what to do as we go along. Working with ethics, we do not always know where to begin, what is going to happen, or where to turn next.

I hope you will come to see, whether you tend to be educationally adventurous or forever cautious, that the measure of ethical conversation and thinking is whether it prompts you to confront and better understand the moral and ethical dimension of the world you have set out to inhabit. If, as assumed here, your ethics as a lawyer cannot be solely and exclusively based on the Rules of Professional Conduct, you may consider lawyer ethics an invited pilgrimage to those places where pockets of meaning and new understandings of law can be found. While pilgrimages of the kind envisioned here cannot be institutionalized, they need not be taken alone. As in any long journey, one can expect discomfort. Anyone who ventures forth to become a lawyer must know there are going to be rough times. Our clients bring us their hard times and we cannot hope to escape such times in our own lives. In uncertain and hard times we are exposed to ethical doubt; we cannot avoid serious doubts and the sense that some of what we do leads nowhere, reminding us that we must make failure a part of our moral education.

Ethical inquiry demands attentiveness and awareness. The more aware we become the more ethics presents itself as paradox and irony. Ethics introduces new complexities, paradoxes making our lives, at once, more simple and more complex. One can expect ethics to make trouble, at times ethics threatens to throw a monkey-wrench into the perpetual motion machine of an unreflective life. Ethics is the burr under the saddle of those who revere a legal mind above all else. The trouble with ethics can be even more subtle as it forces us to slow down and listen, even as talk, talk, talk (or it demands talk when the only experience we have demands silence--again, more paradox).

Some choose, for a variety of reasons, not to subject themselves to the discomforts of ethical inquiry. The only recourse is to respect the discomforts and fears induced by ethical inquiry and see what understandings of ethics might be gained from them. Remember, no teacher, no reading, no text, no conversation can induce you to engage in serious ethical inquiry. The decision to take ethics seriously is one you alone must make.

The readings and exercises presented in this course assume you have, or should have, questions about where you are, what you are doing and what it means to become a lawyer. The key to any question turns on how you approach it and whether you make use of it as an invitation to self-education. Good questions lead to new insights. Admittedly, there are far fewer perplexing questions when we stick close to what we already know. To be without questions (and the doubt they induce) is to be without an impetus to honesty about the human condition.

In this course, you are asked to speak to the world you are given, the world in which you find yourself, and the world which lies just beyond the present day world of lawyering conventions. You are asked to confront the philosophical and existential questions posed by your journey into the world of law. Most basically, ethics calls for reassessment of our taken-for-granted notions of success.

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