TEACHING

USF's law school has pioneered an interactive and collaborative practice-based ethics curriculum, and a unique first-year orientation seminar focusing incoming students on how fundamental notions of truth, justice, and morality relate to their legal education. This early exposure to ethics gives beginning students the opportunity to fuse human values into the law school's educational experience. Ongoing seminars allow students to examine how law school education changes their perspective.

The Center is developing advanced courses focusing on particular issues of critical importance, such as whistleblowing, ethics in criminal law, civil litigation, and environmental law, and ethics for the clinical curriculum. Finally, the Center develops and implements innovative continuing legal education programs for practicing lawyers, and symposia open to the law school community and practicing lawyers alike.

DIALOGUE

The Center promotes a comprehensive and extended dialogue about teaching legal ethics in a way that enriches the law school curriculum. It emphasizes three themes: making ethics accessible and interesting to students; focusing on a practical approach to the profession; and teaching students the importance of personal and professional values.

A Center website dedicated to teaching legal ethics provides for an open exchange of ideas about how to bring this rich subject to life for both students and lawyers. The Center has worked with other law schools in presenting USF's approach to ethics, and faculty at the Center have conducted interactive seminar sessions and ethics orientation programs at other law schools.

SCHOLARSHIP

 The Center faculty will continue to engage in a wide range of scholarship in legal ethics. A symposium issue of the U.S.F. Law Review devoted to the subject of teaching values in law school will be published in Fall 2002. Other scholarship includes: articles for practitioners with a how-to-do-it focus; articles and books expressing a point of view about the profession; proposals for improving the rules that govern the legal profession; and more theoretical work designed to examine and challenge what constitutes ethical law practice.

AN ETHICS COMMUNITY

The Center works with the legal community to bridge the gap between the academic and the practicing lawyer, using the combined expertise of full-time faculty and an array of expert practitioners skilled in legal ethics, including three recent chairs of the California Bar's ethics committee.

The Center is also building a multi-disciplinary community that includes those from other disciplines, expanding its dialogue to topics ranging from business ethics to bioethics, Internet ethics, and the ethics of others such as risk managers, internal auditors, investigators, and interviewers. The Center is committed to the proposition that building such a community strengthens the ethical fabric of both the law and society. For a more specific description of the CALE's current and future projects go to Center Projects.

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