OVERVIEW

Many of us who teach Legal Ethics, Professional Responsibility, or similar courses on the legal profession find it an enriching and fulfilling experience. But many ethics teachers, saddled with large, even huge, class sizes and insufficient units, experience considerable frustration-especially at those schools where ethics and PR are seen less as an important part of the core curriculum and more as an unfortunate necessity.

Not everyone, of course, agrees on how best to teach ethics. (For our thoughts, see How We Teach.) There may be as many good methods for teaching this course as there are good ethics teachers. But it's possible to identify some consensus areas of concern, in addition to too many students and too few units: required courses too closely tied to the MPRE test; schools that state their support for "pervasive" ethics teaching but don't fulfill the promise; and students who, for one reason or another, are not at the right place in their law school careers to best assimilate this subject matter.

Perhaps the most important issue is the role assigned legal ethics-and the image the course has among students, faculty, and administrators alike-at too many law schools.

Below is a summary of some important ethics teaching issues. Undoubtedly there are others. Please join our Open Dialogue to participate in discussion threads on teaching ethics, and answer our SURVEY on how ethics is taught at your law school.

CLASS SIZE AND NUMBER OF UNITS

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing teachers of ethics and professional responsibility is the numbers game--too many students, not enough units--and thus not enough time.

Required ethics courses became common only in the years after the Watergate scandal. Two unit classes in large lecture halls are vestiges of that time. Many schools have not re-examined the course requirements since. Others, though, have recognized that ethics is a discipline that has grown enormously in scholarship and scope in the last generation. Some of these schools have made ethics a focus, increasing units, lowering class size, and offering a panoply of different kinds of ethics classes.

This is still the exception rather than the rule. Ethics is still relatively new as a law school subject, and its image often still lags behind that of other core subjects. Large class size and low, usually two-unit, classes thus remain the large hurdles for many teachers at many schools.

WHERE SHOULD WE PUT ETHICS IN THE CURRENT CURRICULUM?

In the past decade, one of the most hotly debated issues among ethics and PR teachers and law school administrators has been about timing.

Some argue that the course is best taught early-in the first year, before students, through part-time and summer associate jobs and their efforts to "learn to think like a lawyer," get inured to the sometimes hard realities of practicing law. Others argue that first-year students simply don't have the practical experience to appreciate the subject matter, and that the course is best taught in the third year.

The best solution would be to teach ethics early and often-in an introductory fashion at the beginning of the first year, pervasively throughout the law school curriculum, and then in a discrete third year course. But this is not a likely near-future scenario for most schools. At USF, (see How We Teach) we try to come as close as possible by having a specific ethics first-year orientation program, and upper-level courses open to third-years and some second-semester second-year students.

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