Center for Law and Ethics

The Center for Law and Ethics pursues various projects. Its first focus is on legal education and teaching students to be ethical lawyers. Toward that end, law school faculty members teach legal ethics, primarily in seminars limited to an enrollment of 20. In these seminars professors address students' individual moral and ethical commitments and discuss how those should and should not change as students become lawyers. In addition, professors at the law school have explored unorthodox approaches to helping students be happy, healthy and ethical attorneys - from teaching classes on interpersonal dynamics to holding meditation sessions. A symposium issue of the University of San Francisco Law Review addressed some of these unique approaches to values and ethics.

A second focus of the Center is to engage in discussion and debate with practitioners about legal ethics. As part of this project, the Center organized a panel on inadvertent disclosure at the annual meeting of the California State Bar in the fall of 2007 and the Center will host the annual meeting of the California State Bar's Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct in the spring of 2008 (see below).

A third Center project addresses the structure of complex litigation. The Center's director has served as the reporter for the California Supreme Court Task Force on Multidisciplinary Practice and held symposia on complex litigation and, in particular, private antitrust enforcement and class actions.

More information about the Center for Law and Ethics will soon be available on this Web site.

The State Bar of California Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct will hold its 12th annual Statewide Ethics Symposium at the University of San Francisco School of Law on May 3, 2008. The event is being co-sponsored by the Center for Law and Ethics, and is open to USF law students and members of greater law community.

This year's theme is "NOTORIETY - When the Spotlight Is on Ethics." The symposium features a keynote address by Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law at Duke University and founding dean of UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Law.

Panel topics include ethical obligations of public lawyers; inadvertent disclosure of confidential communications; ethics issues in class action and derivative litigation; prosecutorial misconduct; and an update on the Commission for the Revision of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

For more information, please visit the State Bar of California Web site: http://www.calbar.org/ethics-symposium.