The performance of law students at a London college

This article examines the value of jurisprudence in legal education. It argues that jurisprudence should be mandated at an early stage of the students' law curriculum as the legal ideals that may be imparted through a jurisprudence course cannot be adequately taught in a professional ethics course or through teaching jurisprudential perspectives in doctrinal subjects. Law schools have a special responsibility to get students thinking about what law is, what makes law legitimate, and how law is related to justice, morality, politics and rationality. A mandatory jurisprudence course should be intentionally structured along these themes.     

Experiential training for real-life professional impact: the formation of professional identity in trainee solicitors through a discrete intervention course on ethics and lawyering skills

The apprenticeship model of solicitor training in Ireland is split between time spent in the law firm and time spent in professional education at the Law Society of Ireland. Learning in law is a process of shaping identity and becoming part of a community, and professional socialisation is a key aspect of this professional development. However, many trainees arrive at the vocational training stage with little or no understanding of how their personal morals and ethics will impact on their future roles as lawyers. This article relates to an intervention study in the Law Society of Ireland with trainee solicitors at professional legal education level in the form of a two-month course entitled “Certificate in Legal Ethics and Lawyering Skills”. This intervention embraces an experiential learning approach and a wide view of ethics that moves beyond a defensive rule-based approach and supports trainees in grappling with ethics and negotiating within the more rigid and collectively based moral discourses which are a necessary part of constructing professional identity. The course framework embraced a variety of pedagogic approaches for effective teaching and fostering ethical professional identity such as role-play, small group discussion, video and online discussion forums and mixed method assessment.     

Law as a culture: Global thoughts from a small Island*

ABSTRACT

This paper will seek to address the challenges of teaching legal ethics to undergraduate law students, both generally and in my own institutional context. Ethical conduct has long been held to be a central feature of professionalism and, traditionally, codes of ethics constituted one of the hallmarks and defining characteristics of the professions. The legal profession is no exception to this; however, it has not always been recognised that university law schools have an important role to play in preparing law students for the ethical challenges of legal practice. More recently this indifference has given way to an acceptance of the importance of this area of learning. Rather than being whether to teach legal ethics to law students, therefore, the two fundamental questions for educators are, first, what do students need to learn from the teaching of legal ethics and, secondly, how this is to be achieved. This study also aims to consider the specific challenges of teaching legal ethics to law students from widening participation backgrounds. These issues are particularly important in my own professional context as programme leader for an undergraduate qualifying law degree at an institution with a high population of widening participation students.     

Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis

In the terms of Erving Goffman's classic role‐distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self‐construction. This article takes an exploratory micro‐dynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. Over the course of their legal education, students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public‐interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. The article concludes with normative and theoretical implications.     

Tippins and Wittman Revisited: Law,Social Science,and the Role of the Child Custody Expert 14 Years Later

It has been 14 years since Tippins and Wittmann ( 2005 ) voiced concern for the overreaching role the expert may play in matters of family law. This article sets their levels of inference within the context of the culture of both law and social science. We examine how inferences are impacted by the relative emphasis child custody experts give to the five stakeholders involved in child custody evaluations (CCEs): courts, lawyers, parents, children, and professional governing bodies. Acculturation of the assessor to law contributes to more egregious inferences, versus the more modest ones Tippins and Wittmann advocated. How evaluators prioritize stakeholders shapes their opinion and methodology. We offer an expanded perspective that views how their levels of inference are manifest in reports, methodology, and recommendations and the influence of the culture of law and the mindset of the clinician. We hope to encourage clinicians to find ways to operationalize clinical humility, assume their proper role, and remain true to their master identity as licensed mental health professionals and their proper sphere of authority.     

Law School Instruction in Professional Responsibility: A Curricular Paradox

Legal ethics has recently become the focus of professional and public concern. One aspect of that concern has to do with the education and socialization of law students in professional responsibility. This study, using data from a sample of law students in diverse school settings, examines the influence of prevailing learning norms in legal education on student responses to courses in professional responsibility. The author also reviews the bases of ambiguous sentiments about the role of education in professional ethics and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties and dilemmas involved in attempts to alter the established mode of instruction.     

Teaching Dissent in the Law School: Have Students Learned to Disagree?

This paper offers an analysis of the qualitative evidence obtained from a research project in relation to the teaching of a module on the Trials of Dissenters in the context of an undergraduate law degree. It will consider whether a pedagogically innovative course has encouraged and enabled undergraduate law students to think more creatively on the issues raised by specific historic trials and to be prepared to construct more critical and open ended arguments. The study of the Trials of Dissenters, we hoped, would encourage our students to dissent both from the standard model of legal education and from the acceptance of what lecturers say as “true”. We here consider the success of our project in relation to how students view dissent.     

Teaching medical ethics and law

The teaching of medical ethics is not yet characterised by recognised, standard requirements for formal qualifications, training and experience; this is not surprising as the field is still relatively young and maturing. Under the broad issue of the requirements for teaching medical ethics are numerous more specific questions, one of which concerns whether medical ethics can be taught in isolation from considerations of the law, and vice versa. Ethics and law are cognate, though distinguishable, disciplines. In a practical, professional enterprise such as medicine, they cannot and should not be taught as separate subjects. One way of introducing students to the links and tensions between medical ethics and law is to consider the history of law via its natural and positive traditions. This encourages understanding of how medical practice is placed within the contexts of ethics and law in the pluralist societies in which most students will practise. Four examples of topics from medical ethics teaching are described to support this claim. Australasian medical ethics teachers have paid less attention to the role of law in their curricula than their United Kingdom counterparts. Questions like the one addressed here will help inform future deliberations concerning minimal requirements for teaching medical ethics.     

The evolution of informed consent

Informed consent and the changes in what is expected over the 21st century provide an instructive case study of the mutual influence on one another of medical law and medical ethics. Over the years we have moved from a doctor-centred standard to a patient-centred standard and from a one-size-fits-all patient-centred standard to a more individual requirement that engages with the needs of a particular patient It is unreasonable to expect those changes to be reflected in anything less than an extended conversation in which the health care professional gives out some version of what a reasonable patient would expect to hear from an informed health care professional and then responds to the patient's questions as informatively and helpfully as he or she can. It is therefore convenient to refer to spontaneous and responsive disclosure as a very concrete implementation of the health care professional-patient partnership that is contemporary health care and at the heart of health care ethics.     

法学教育中的法律伦理教育问题研究

从法律的内在价值要求、我国法治建设中存在的问题,提出法律伦理教育是我国法学教育不可或缺的重要组成部分.法律伦理包括蕴含在法律制度中的制度伦理与法律职业者在职业活动中的法律行为伦理即职业道德两部分.法律伦理教育的目标就是要把学生培养成为具有健全的法律伦理人格,有助于法律终极目标实现的"社会医生".这一目标的实现有赖于法学教育理念的重构和法学教学方法的转变.目前,开展法律伦理教育面临的障碍主要有思想认识上的偏颇,社会"道德滑坡"的大环境以及法律国家主义的影响等.     

Educating towards ethical lawyers: a progress report

In 2010 in a conference paper on legal education and ethics, we addressed the proposition that exempting degrees offer a unique opportunity to inculcate students with the importance of ethical considerations throughout their legal education, incorporating such considerations in an integrated academic and vocational context. The paper included a detailed analysis of the practicalities of incorporating professional legal ethics into the undergraduate exempting law degree at Northumbria University. Since 2010, there has been relatively little written from a UK perspective on incorporating teaching of legal ethics at the undergraduate stage. Here we review our progress made towards achieving that goal. The article reveals that the results have been limited; we explore the reasons for this, and consider what alternative course(s) might have been followed. As such, our experiences may offer guidance for those intending to engage with the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) recommendations to incorporate some consideration of ethics into legal education.     

融环境教育于生活世界之中

环境法治需要特定类型的文化作为根基，这种类型的文化特点是公泉有强烈的环境权利意识。能自觉遵守法律，并在环境立法、执法、司法过程中能够广泛地参与。只有公束参与，环境法律文化结构中的观念文化与制度文化才能和谐统一，环境法治才可以实现。公泉法律意识的提高需要大众化的环境教育，公泉认同是环境权的本原。法科大学生作为公粟内的一个群体，对其进行环境法学专业化教育要立足于公粟生活世界基础上。     

性侵幼女犯罪之成因及其防范

近年来性侵幼女犯罪案件频发已经引令人瞩目，究其原因是多方面的，社会道德沦丧致使道德底线崩溃、传统文化的心理模铸、职业道德意识淡漠部分幼儿监管不到位、防性侵意识弱、不少施暴者应该说有着猎奇甚至是变态心理、家丑不可外扬思想作怪等等不一而足。这就要求我们必须有针对性地采取防范措施，严惩犯罪犯罪嫌疑人，坚决杜绝类似事件的发生，保持高压的态势，在人们的心里筑起一道不可逾越的鸿沟，让胆敢以身试法之人得到应有的下场；细化和完善有关的法律法规，使不法分子无机可乘；加强职业道德建设，设置更高更合理的选人门槛和用人评价机制，注重从业人员道德品格的考核和评价；加强对于未成年孩子的安全意识的教育和引导。     

The importance of ethics in the law curriculum: essential or incidental?

Recently, the debate as to whether ethics should be a compulsory requirement of a law degree was refuelled when the English and Welsh Legal Education Training Review (LETR) recommended that professional ethics should be primarily addressed in vocational Legal Services and Education Training programmes and that learning outcomes in the academic curriculum should include reference to morality and the law, the values supporting the legal system and their connection to the role of lawyers. This debate is also occurring in other jurisdictions. In Australia the debate is focused on the proposal that ethics be removed as a compulsory subject in the law degree. This proposal has raised a concern that law students will be denied the opportunity to develop as ethically competent lawyers. This paper argues for the continuation of ethics as a core component of a law degree and evidences the model used for the teaching of ethics in the law degree at the University of Technology Sydney in support of our argument. The background to the model is examined to highlight the significance of student feedback and ongoing curriculum review, including the alignment of parallel pedagogical factors. This model serves as an example of not only why ethics should be core to a law degree but, in order to provide graduates who are ethical and reflective practitioners, why ethics should be pervasively taught throughout the degree and supported by an introductory and capstone presence.     

The ethical identity of law students

This paper uses measures of values, moral outlook and professional identity to explore the ethical and professional identity of law students. We do so in two jurisdictions, surveying 441 students studying in England and Wales and 569 students studying in the US. The survey covers the first and final years of an undergraduate law degree and the postgraduate vocational stage in England and Wales, as well as students in all years of the JD programme in the US. We explore whether law students towards the end of their legal education have ethical identities predictive of less ethical conduct than those at the beginning of their legal education; whether law students intending careers in business law have values and profiles consistent with less ethical conduct than those intending to work for government or individuals; and what factors might explain these differences in ethical outlook. Our findings suggest that ethical identity is strongly associated with gender and career intentions. They also suggest weaker moral identities for students intending to practise business law. Ultimately, our findings support a conclusion that is more nuanced than the predominant theses about the impact of legal education on student ethicality which tend to suggest legal education diminishes ethicality.     

The use of a virtual learning environment: The Hong Kong experience

This paper argues for the teaching of ethics in financial services law through blended learning comprising face-to-face and online case studies. It draws on the insights of previous blended teaching in business management and corporate law to provide the justifications for its application in the teaching of ethics in financial services law. The measured success for the use of blended teaching in prior situations, the limitations of existing teaching through the conventional lecture method and the coming through of students increasingly exposed to active-based learning via information communications technology further justifies its application in financial law courses. The paper addresses the why, what and how issues in connection with the teaching of ethics in financial services law. It advocates strongly why teaching of ethics should cover hard and soft laws and even beyond to incorporate the relationships at play in the marketplace to provide more balanced and practical insights for law students. Though the article relies primarily on secondary data, it generated significant implications for the teaching of ethics in financial services law through a pervasive approach in contrast to stand-alone legal ethics courses.     

Values ethics and legal ethics: the QLD and LETR Recommendations 6, 7, 10, and 11

The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) Report recommended increased attention to ethics and values and to critical thinking. These aims could be achieved jointly through teaching ethical thinking: not as theory but as part of developing the capacity for ethical conduct. Such a pedagogy has the potential to become a qualifying law degree (QLD) signature pedagogy supporting “life-narratives” of students. The LETR Report recommends a review of the QLD emphasising legal values and ethics. Concern with values and ethics is linked to concern with professional conduct. Maintaining the law degree as a general or liberal qualification is also strongly desired. These potentially conflicting drivers generate ambivalence towards legal ethics as a subject for study, especially if legal ethics are perceived as teaching the professional codes.

Resolution of this tension is achievable through recognising the potential role of ethical teaching as part of an identity apprenticeship. Developing ethical character is as much a liberal as a professional aim. Ethics teaching can play an integrative role in the QLD. Formation of student identity is a central part of higher education taking colouration from being situated in legal education. In this context teaching legal ethics becomes the use of a salient example for carrying out the broader project of developing ethical capacity.     

The place of law in a business studies curriculum

Abstract

LEGAL ETHICS are the values that inform the practice of law. This article establishes what and how Australian law schools teach about legal ethics and suggests what and how Australian law schools should teach about legal ethics.

First, the article establishes that Australian law schools tend to teach legal ethics as if it were only concerned with the law of lawyering. It also establishes that Australian law schools tend to teach legal ethics discretely over the course of one subject out of the whole undergraduate curriculum.

Secondly, this article suggests the adoption of a new approach to legal ethics as the ability to exercise legal ethical judgment. It also suggests a pervasive method of instruction that integrates issues of legal ethics and the process of legal ethical judgment into every subject in the undergraduate curriculum in combination with discrete subjects on the context and substance of the law of lawyering.     

Using soft skills courses to inspire law teachers: a new methodology for a more humanistic legal education

ABSTRACT

Law schools have in recent years been engaged in a process of revising their curricula, in large part adapting to rapid changes in technology, but also in a more generalised effort to improve “teaching the law”. Yet thus far, legal pedagogy seems to focus disproportionately on the traditional model of the “thinking lawyer”, when it should equally promote the model of the “feeling lawyer”, helping students to sharpen soft skills such as empathy, integrity and problem-solving. The main claim of this paper is that law professors could begin to pay more attention to the growing importance of soft skills in legal education and preparedness for legal practice. In this direction, we propose a set of pedagogical principles revolving around four axes: compassionate, attentive, reason-based and empathetic teaching (CARE). This methodology could help law professors become more effective pedagogues. Soft skills courses constitute a well-suited vehicle for introducing these principles to law school curricula in different legal systems. By systematically incorporating them, law schools can encourage law teachers to provide a more inclusive learning environment for their students. At the same time, law teachers who implement the particular methodology can hopefully rediscover fulfilment in their teaching. Overall, teaching soft skills can significantly improve students’ and teachers’ experience in legal education.     

The legal status of clinical and ethics policies, codes, and guidelines in medical practice and research

This article examines the legal status of "soft law" in the fields of medicine and medical research. Many areas of clinical practice and research involve complex and rapidly changing issues for which the law provides no guidance. Instead, guidance for physicians and researchers comes from what has often been called "soft law"--non-legislative, non-regulatory sources, such as ethics policy statements, codes, and guidelines from professional or quasi-governmental bodies. This article traces the evolution of these "soft law" instruments: how they are created, how they are adopted within the professional community, and how they become accepted by the courts. It studies the relationship between soft law instruments and the courts. It includes an examination of the approaches to judicial analysis used by the courts in theory and in practice. The authors then examine the jurisprudence to see how courts will adopt professional norms as the legal standard of care in some circumstances and not others. They consider the legal concerns and ethical issues surrounding the weight attached to professional practices and norms in law. The authors demonstrate how practices and policies that guide professional conduct may ultimately bear weight as norms recognizable and enforceable within the legal sphere.