Teaching Legal Ethics to Law Students: Why,What,How and Who Might Teach?

Abstract

The article explores what a specific course on ethics should be in a law school, and what is the impact of such curricular changes on this field.

Learning of ethics is not always regarded as something important in the law curriculum, but it is crucial to education of future lawyers. Teaching ethics in law schools is also necessary to deal with public perception about the legal profession. Lawyers have to make choices all the time, so students need to be prepared to do so. Ethical decision making should be taught to students, giving them the necessary tools to go through a discernment process. It is also essential to cultivate students’ autonomy to make decisions. An active-participative paradigm might enhance learning among students. They can learn more while doing different activities, and especially working in groups with their peers, to solve ethical dilemmas. In order to be prepared to solve those dilemmas, students need to learn a discernment method. We offer one in particular: the See–Judge–Act method.

There are three approaches to what students should be challenged to learn: knowing the rules, working with dilemmas and judging. We advocate for the third one. We explore the necessary relation of an ethics course with legal clinics and other courses, stating that teaching legal ethics needs a context, and that the context may be given by the other courses. Having an interdisciplinary approach to ethics is beneficial for students, and this can be achieved by sharing the class with a non-lawyer professor.