Teaching Law Students about Ethics

While teaching a professional responsibility course at DePaul University College of Law, Howard M. Rubin uses a recent case to demonstrate tricky ethical dilemmas.

The case involves Alton Logan, who was released from prison in 2008, after more than 25 years. Two former Cook County assistant public defenders kept silent for 26 years about Logan’s wrongful conviction in a murder case to protect the confidences of their client.

“It really gets them to focus on things thinking as a lawyer, not as members of the public,” said Rubin, who also serves as DePaul’s associate dean for lawyering skills.

The students’ immediate reaction is that they would never keep such a secret, Rubin said.

“It’s a matter of working so that they understand we have obligations in our profession,” Rubin said. “They’re going to have to do things as a member of the profession that are contrary to what their friends and members of the public will tell them is the right thing to do.”

The Alton Logan case is an extreme example of professional obligation, but for legal educators, bridging that gap of understanding is growing into a significant piece of the work of law schools. Despite the growth of clinical education, law schools remain, to a marked degree, aloof from the daily demands of the profession.

But a book published two years ago by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law,” has created a buzz about improving legal education, including the teaching of ethics.

The premise of the report is that American law schools are good at teaching students to become smart problem solvers, but are not doing enough to develop “the capacity for judgment guided by a sense of professional responsibility.”

“This is a pretty powerful critique of American legal education,” Clark D. Cunningham, director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics and Professionalism, a consortium of ethics centers at five universities, said of “Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law,” commonly called the Carnegie report.

That report recommends an integrated program of legal education that would begin in the first year with “well-designed lawyering courses … taught as intentional complements to doctrinal instruction. Ideally, this experience of complementarity would continue in the second and third years as a gradual development of practical knowledge and skill, beginning in simulation and moving into actual responsibility for clients.”

Many law professors say the teaching of legal ethics to law students is undergoing an evolution at some law schools in the wake of the Carnegie report, and another book, “Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map,” also published in 2007.

“There has been an increased focus both internationally and in the United States on teaching legal ethics and developing professionalism,” said Cunningham, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law. “In the last three years, I’ve seen dramatically more interest and more across-the-board reform than I’ve seen in my prior 20 years of teaching, especially related to legal ethics issues.”

Cunningham said the reforms include the Carnegie report recommendation about an integrated legal education program.

“I think the Carnegie report said the right thing at the right time and has had a catalytic effect,” Cunningham said. “That book has been very, very widely discussed, both in law schools and the legal profession. I think it’s an incredible development.”