International website for teaching ethics and professionalism

At the Learning in Law Annual Conference 2010, Charlotte Alexander (Georgia State University, USA), Nigel Duncan (City University) and Paul Maharg (then University of Strathclyde) led a workshop and discussion forum taking the form of the ‘world premiere’ for a new website on teaching ethics and professionalism.

Teaching ethics and promoting the development of professionalism are currently vibrant and important topics in both legal education and the law profession. A considerable amount of information exists around the world about ways to teach legal ethics and promote professionalism, however this information is typically focused within one jurisdiction – usually available only in print format in publications known and available only within that jurisdiction. As a result actual examples of effective and innovative teaching methods are difficult to find and obtain.

A new online community and resource library is being set up to meet this need, aiming to catalyse innovative teaching and to empower law teachers to participate in a global community dedicated to the effective teaching of ethics and professionalism. The site is intended to become the primary online gathering place and clearinghouse for an international community of ethics teachers, scholars, and practitioners, acting as an organising tool for efforts to change the culture of legal education and to increase the emphasis on ethics and professionalism education across jurisdictions and throughout law schools’ curricula.

The International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics and Professionalism, funded by UKCLE and the National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism (USA), aims to:

• consolidate materials on the teaching of legal ethics and professionalism into a fully searchable bibliography
• offer facilities to upload and download scholarship and teaching materials (including webcasts and other multi-media), to post comments on their use and to create webpages
• provide a forum for commentary and exchange of ideas on teaching ethics and promoting professionalism

The initial English language version of the site, with contributions from as many common law jurisdictions as possible, will be launched by September 2010, with expansion into other languages and civil law jurisdictions a long term goal.

About the presenters

Charlotte Alexander is Deputy Director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, a consortium of university ethics centres based at the Georgia State University College of Law. She is currently co-authoring (with Clark Cunningham) a book chapter entitled ‘The Carnegie Foundation critique of American legal education prompts new focus: the development of professional judgment’, to appear in The ethics project in legal education (Routledge, forthcoming).

Nigel Duncan is a principal lecturer at City Law School and editor of The Law Teacher. He is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and the Practice, Profession & Ethics subject section of the Society of Legal Scholars. Nigel’s recent National Teaching Fellowship resulted in a proposal for an international website on teaching ethics, presented at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2009, which led to the international collaboration which has produced the teaching legal ethics site.

Paul Maharg was until February 2010 a professor of law in the Glasgow Graduate School (GGSL), University of Strathclyde. He is the author of Transforming legal education: learning and teaching the law in the early 21st century (2007, Ashgate), and has published widely in the fields of legal education and professional learning design. He blogs at Zeugma.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010