A 4-Credit 1L Course on the Legal Profession

Yes, that is right.  After a year of committee work and a few weeks of intense deliberations, the faculty at Indiana Law recently voted to revise our 1L curriculum to make room for a new 4-credit Legal Professions course.   

Our strategic plan makes a commitment to “offer our students a continuously updated curriculum that meets the changing needs of the profession and professionalism."  This new course attempts to actually deliver on those words.  It also represents a large bet on the pedagogical value of socio-legal research on the profession.

Our theory is two-fold.  First, drawing upon carefully edited ethnographies and empirical studies, the course will provide students with a systematic overview of various practice settings.  Obviously, workplace structure and incentives vary widely between large law firms, plaintiffs' lawyers, mill practice, prosecutors, public interest lawyers, etc.  If students have a better theoretical and factual understanding of the modern legal marketplace, they can better understand the subtle factors that push lawyers to cross ethical lines--and the serious consequences that can follow.

Second, by frontloading legal ethics in the 1L curriculum, we hope to address the issue, flagged by both the recent Carnegie Report and the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE), that legal education tends to marginalize ethics, morality, and personal and professional values.   According to the Carnegie Report, this is a by-product of the singleminded focus on legal reasoning ("thinking like a lawyer") in the 1L curriculum. After the first year, the Report finds, many students are left doubting that ethics or morality have any relevance to professional success; and a mandatory upper-level course in Professional Responsibility is too little too late.

Unfortunately, the critique by the Carnegie Report is consistent with LSSSE data, which reveal a downward trend from the 1L to 3L year in the number of students reporting that law school has contributed to their "code of personal values and ethics."  While I can understand the hesitancy of law faculty to foist their own views onto their students, this is not a good trendline.  As the Carnegie Report observes, changing this dynamic requires more than the usual incremental change of adding a new course or expanding a clinic.

Our longterm  goal is to create a Legal Professions coursebook that offers a better way to teach the required PR materials while simultaneously laying the foundation for more satisfying and successful careers for our students.  I will keep ELS readers informed on our progress.

Comments

[CarolynShapiro]

Bill -- As a fellow PR teacher, I will be very interested in your experiences with this class. Congratulations and good luck!

[david giacalone]

Thank you, Bill. Very helpful. I turn to Lowell B. Komie's short-story fiction for the essence of solo practice.

[William Henderson]

David,

Getting pushed for clarity is a good thing.

Ethnography is a genre of writing explore a social phenomena based on some type of field work. Often it includes both quantitative and qualitative components. When I said "carefully crafted", however, I should have written "carefully edited". We want to use the descriptive component of this research without necessarily focusing on the social science theory and methodology.

For example, in my Law Firms class, I use Jerry Van Hoy's work on franchise law firms, Bryant Garth's and Sara Parikh's work on Phil Corboy (the famous Chicago trial lawyer), Michael Kelley's The Lives of Lawyers, which has lots of vignettes of different practice settings, Lynn Mather et al.'s work on New England divorce lawyers, and Stephen Daniels and Joanne Martin's work on the Texas plaintiffs' bar.

[david giacalone]

Bill, I have no idea what a "carefully crafted ethnography" might entail. Could you enlighten this barbarian?

[Bill Henderson]

Rick, Eric, and John raise a interesting point.

It would be hard to operationalize an "ethical lawyering" variable. My own observation, cobbled together from anecdote, is that ethics are a major component of a successful law practice, and perhaps required for longterm happiness in the profession. This course, through involvement of IU alumni, will explicitly ask these questions.

John has been teaching legal ethics and practicing law for many years--his observations above carry a lot of weight with me.

One empirical note: IU Law has participated in LSSSE since it began five years ago, and the LSSSE survey contains quite a few questions pertaining to ethics and personal and professional values. If the theory behind the course is correct, many of our historic numbers should trend up--that is our goal.

Further, LSSSE is set up to facilitate longitudinal studies. So Rick, I may be seeking your advice on a research design. bh.

[John Steele]

One metric worth tracking is student satisfaction in the course. Anecdotally, I've found that empirical approaches to the required PR course, which help students map out career choices, have much higher satisfaction that doctrinal approaches, moral philosophy approches, etc.

As for whether or not it makes them more ethical, I can't say and out of respect to this blog's empirical approach I won't even speculate. However, I will speculate that the sooner the law student finds the place in the profession that suits her ethical sensibilities, the more satisfying her career.

[Eric Goldman]

This is great, Bill. Congratulations. Following Rick's Q, do you have any metrics to test the assumptions above and to gauge the efficacy/success of the course? Eric.

[Rick Lempert]

Has anyone ever studied empirically whether ethics courses in any profession pay off in more ethical conduct by students later in their careers? I would be interested in references to such work if there is any.

Rick