When and how should legal ethics be learned?

contributors | abstract | presentation | biographies

Contributors

Clark D. Cunningham (Georgia State University)
Nigel Duncan (City University)
Paul Maharg (Northumbria University)

Intended format

Discussion forum

Abstract

In March 2009 the Law Society of England and Wales released the long-awaited report by Kim Economides and Justine Rogers on Preparatory Ethics Training for Future Solicitors. The report recommended that the Law Society take the lead in initiating “tripartite discussion” among the Law Society, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and representatives of the legal academic community to reach consensus on the goal of making “awareness of and commitment to legal values and the moral context of law mandatory in undergraduate degrees” and specifying “outcomes” of such education. The report further recommended that if such discussions fail to reach consensus the Solicitors Regulation Authority should “unilaterally require anyone seeking to proceed to the vocational stage of qualification as a solicitor [to] demonstrate knowledge, understanding and commitment to the core values enunciated in Rule One of the Solicitors Code of Conduct.”

Other recommendations included:

1. roundtable discussions between undergraduate law teachers and vocational course providers to discuss optimal division of learning outcomes;
2. establishment of a national centre for ethical instruction and assessment for training and regulating instructors;
3. establishment of rigorous outcomes for ethical instruction in the training contract including a modification in the TC appraisal form to include a professional responsibility section and
4. regular discussion groups at conferences and through other networks to encourage teachers, practitioners and students to discuss ethical dilemmas and share illustrative stories.

This session will begin with a discussion of efforts to date to explore implementation of the recommendations of the Economides/Rogers report. The presenters will seek status reports from representatives of the Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority. The report will then be placed in the context of concurrent actions in other jurisdictions either to make ethics instruction mandatory (e.g. Canada, Scotland) or, where already mandatory, to expand the scope of such instruction (e.g. Australia and USA). The session will conclude by exploring whether, and when, a special-purpose conference on this topic would be appropriate.

Presentation

Short biographies of panel members

Clark Cunningham is W Lee Burge Professor of Law and Ethics at the Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, USA, where he directs the criminal justice clinic and teaches legal ethics and comparative constitutional law. His work has been published widely and he has been a visiting scholar at several institutions. He directed a three year Ford Foundation project to support the development of law school clinics in India and served on the first steering committee of the Global Alliance for Justice Education.

Nigel Duncan is a Principal Lecturer at the City Law School, where he is academic lead for assessment and chairs the good academic practice group. He is editor of The Law Teacher. Nigel is a National Teaching Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies. as well as a founder member of the Clinical Legal Education Organisation (CLEO) and the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE). He sits on UKCLE’s Advisory Board and Strategy Committee.

Paul Maharg is Professor of Legal Education in the School of Law, University of Northumbria. He was Director of the two-year, JISC/UKCLE-funded project, SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment – http://simplecommunity.org). He is the author of Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century (2007, Ashgate Publishing, www.transforming.org.uk), editor of and contributor to Digital Games and Learning (2010, in press, Continuum Publishers), and has published widely in the fields of legal education and professional learning design. His specialisms include interdisciplinary educational design, and the use of ICT at all levels of legal education. He was appointed a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Fellow of the RSA (www.thersa.org). He blogs at http://zeugma.typepad.com.

Last Modified: 27 January 2011