Professional
Responsibility  Course Biography A full-fledged course in professional responsibility/legal ethics 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. Ideally, there would be additional ethics courses available during each succeeding year. When law teachers first entertained the idea of a required legal ethics course, they were faced with a choice: teach legal ethics as a law course The outcome was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Today, legal ethics and professional responsibility courses at most law schools focus primarily (if not exclusively) on the "rules" of lawyer ethics and the law of lawyering. The temptation to teach legal ethics as a law course is substantial and relentless. Every state has adopted a set of rules to govern lawyering conduct (with a majority of states, including West Virginia, adopting rules modeled on the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct). The general assumption seems to be that with a single required legal ethics course it should focus on the profession's ethical rules. Consequently, law teachers tend to envision legal ethics as a branch of law; lawyer ethics having been transmuted in the process 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 moral/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, as virtually any lawyer would confirm. While scholars of moral philosophy and legal ethics teachers basically agree that an ethics devoted to rules is an impoverished ethics, the scholarly consensus on the limited role of ethical rules in moral conduct (and being a "good" lawyer) is not adequately reflected in the design and teaching of legal ethics and professional responsibility courses in American law schools. In a professional responsibility/legal ethics course we are constantly plagued by the conflicting pull to:
This conflicting pull reflects conflicting visions of legal ethics, one vision of legal ethics rooted in a set of ethical rules, the other vision, an idea of lawyer ethics that emerges from a sustained exploration of the moral sentiments and concerns interwoven in the everyday affairs of legal practice and a lawyer's life. When we make the tension between "legal thinking" and "moral discourse" a part of the legal ethics course, the course takes a different turn than when we stay close to the rules. As we begin to explore the moral dimension of lawyering, some students find the course more engaging and more valuable while others find the departure from the study of ethical rules annoying, and a source of discomfort. While I have never detected any great affection for the traditional rule-based approach to legal ethics among students (historically the course has been viewed with disdain and derision by students), many find the effort to teach lawyer ethics as ethics objectionable. We are left, then, with the tedium of the conventional study of ethical rules and the anxiety. confusion, dismay, and anger that accompanies an exploration of the moral undertow in legal work. Yet there are students who express concern about the moral dimension of legal work and are deeply troubled by aspects of the world they are about to enter. It is the concern of these students, and the openness and curiosity of others, that makes a real lawyer ethics course possible.
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teach legal ethics as an ethics course