OVERVIEW

The basic required ethics course taught at USF Law is called "Legal Ethics and the Practice of Law." The title is intended to emphasize our philosophy of teaching a "real world"practice-based ethics course that will provide material guidance to our students as they ready themselves to enter the profession.

The course is taught in the second and third year, and consists entirely of small-section three-hour seminar classes that allow time to discuss and grapple with important concepts in a forum where depth and breadth of learning can be emphasized. While fulltime faculty teach some sections, the majority of the classes are taught by trained practitioner/teachers who have particular expertise in the field of legal ethics, including the director of the Center.

Among the goals of the course are to:

  • Teach students how to recognize ethical dilemmas soon after they occur, enabling them to begin solving the problem early on.
  • Familiarize students with the rules of professional conduct and teach them how to use these rules as they are likely to arise in their daily lives as lawyers.
  • Facilitate and encourage students' understanding of themselves as future lawyers able to balance personal and social morality with the practical and economic realities of their practice and their obligations to clients.

    The curriculum features several significant innovative techniques and materials. Some of these include:

  • A practical, "real world" emphasis to studying ethical problems. A problem-driven approach, with readings, including applicable statutes, case law, ethics opinions, and commentary, that feed into discussion of the problems.
  • A non-lecture, interactive format, with student discussion leaders and extensive role-playing.
  • A de-emphasis on rote rule-learning, and a focus on analyzing the ethical concepts that underlie the rules.
  • A focus on ethical dilemmas rather than bright line tests, and on problem recognition as the key to problem-solving.
  • Use of extensive colloquial readings (New York Times, National Law Journal, Wall Street Journal, etc.) to show how ethical issues operate in everyday law practice.
  • Broad course coverage, including: bias in the profession, substance abuse and stress, and ethical dilemmas in specific practice areas such as insurance defense, municipal law, mediation, and class actions.
  • An orientation program designed specifically for new law students.
  • Ongoing discussion of key issues including the tension between ethics and morality, the realities of being a large firm associate, and malpractice liability.

COURSE BOOK AND SYLLABUS

Most of our classes are using Zitrin & Langford, Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law (2nd Edition, LexisNexis, 2001) as our course book. This volume is written by USF professors whose goal, in part, was to implement the teaching philosophy developed at USF. Accordingly, the syllabus of most teaching sections-allowing for considerable personal variations-closely tracks the book's table of contents. The course book and teacher's manual were also designed to closely track the interactive, practice-based, problem-oriented teaching methodology developed over the last 25 years in USF ethics seminars.

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