Reading Assignment: Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried 3-25 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

What could soldiers and the "things" they carry into war possibly have to do with an exploration of the ethics we carry with us into lawyering? Is the excerpt from Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, a sensible, or in any way helpful, introductory reading for Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers?

For many, legal education is paradoxical, both a source of a powerful way of thinking and solving problems, and at the same time, an assault on what you brought with you to the study of law. If law school has affected you in dramatic ways (and for some it seems not to have much effect), then you might want to think carefully about what you being with you to law school and whether you will leave with your valued possessions intact.

What did you bring with you to law school?

What kind of "things" will you carry with from law school into your work as a lawyer?

The basic claims can be simply stated: We do not begin a study of ethics with a clean slate. We carry something -- call it character, identity, ideology, experience, history, culture -- with us into this effort to understand lawyer ethics. Law teachers assume, rightly or wrongly, that what you bring with you to the study of law is little or no value to what you must now learn. (It's not at all clear that law teachers would be willing to go on record as having no interest in what you bring with you to their classroom, but this is exactly the stance they seem to take in their everyday teaching.) While there is little risk, one might assume to the self, or to your character in a study of civil procedure or administrative law, even those most skeptical of the possibilities of teaching virtue realize that there is more at stake in the study of lawyer ethics (conceived as something more than the law of lawyering).

If, indeed, ethics is deeply rooted in the self (as students will sometimes say), then this deeply embedded self is part of what we bring to a lawyer ethics courses.

  Can We Teach Virtue?

On the use of Tim O'Brien's essay as a preface to an account of legal writing, see James R. Elkins, The Things They Carry Into Legal Writing

On the "assault" of the self that takes place in legal education, see James R. Elkins, The Transformation of Self

Tim O'Brien, Novelist, Home Page

Tim O'Brien, Writing Vietnam (lecture)

Writing Vietnam: Writers' Forum

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