Professional Responsibility Course Information My office is Rm. 110. I generally work at home. You can most easily reach me by email: jelkins@labs.net. I have a listed telephone number and you are welcome to call me at home. I will generally be available, in my office, before class. I can meet with you anytime by appointment (easily arranged by email). My secretary is Karen Feathers. She is located in Rm. 117. The only assigned text for the course (along with a packet of xeroxed materials) is: Monroe H. Freedman & Abbe Smith, Understanding Lawyers' Ethics (Newark, New Jersey; LexisNexis, 2nd ed., 2002) Freedman & Smith is not the "typical" student study guide and it does not follow the most common conventions associated with a "treatise." I have assigned the book for several reasons: Monroe Freedman is a long-standing student of lawyer ethics and has always been willing to take a stance and engage with those who disagree with him (as I often do). The writing in Understanding Lawyers' Ethics is sharp, clean-edged and the arguments are well-defined and vigorously presented. Freedman & Smith have not attempted an Olympian perspective or an "objective" view. They lay out issues; they also take sides in on-going arguments. Consequently, there may be times when you disagree with their position, just as you will find times when you disagree with those of your colleagues and with me. The course depends upon thoughtful, careful reading, and rigorous participation in classroom discussion. Your work in the course will be suffer if you fail to attend, listen, speak your mind, learn from our disagreements, and learn the grounds on which agreements are worked out. This means you should be present for each class. Failure to attend class may be taken into account in determining your grade for the course. The day-to-day assignments will be made via the course web-site. Many of the assigned readings will be available exclusively on the course web-site. I assume you have ready access to the web and know how to naviagate a website. If this is not the case and you need help, you should seek assistance from the library staff or from me. If you discover materials or readings relevant to our class discussions, bring them to my attention, and I will try to incorporate them into the course. I will announce during the first course meetings how you will be evaluated for purposes of a course grade. I have been teaching and writing about the pedagogy of lawyer ethics for some 25 years, teaching the course for the first time in 1977, my first year on the West Virginia University College of Law faculty. Instructor's Writings on Lawyer Ethics If you want to pursue additional scholarly writings on lawyer ethics, you might began by perusing my course bibliography: Bibliography