Law school and the making of the law student into a lawyer

In her paper Seow Hon Tan (National University of Singapore) presented the preliminary findings of a project exploring the impact of the first year at law school on the moral and professional development of students.

An article by Seow Hon, Teaching legal ideals through jurisprudence, appeared in The Law Teacher 43(1):14-36, March 2009.

To what extent does law school remake the law student and develop the moral and professional identity of the future lawyer? Through surveys delivered at the beginning and end of the year the views of the first year cohort from the academic year 2006-07 at the National University of Singapore were sought on a variety of questions touching on legal philosophy and ethics, with the aim of examining if there were significant changes in views over the course of the year.

A randomly selected segment of the cohort was also interviewed to explore the reasons behind the answers. For the first survey, answers suggesting a conflict between personal values and the perceived professional values of lawyering were probed, while the second set of interviews focused on the reasons for different answers to the same questions in the two surveys, with a view to discerning the cause for change – whether it was due to the study of doctrinal subjects, the learning of legal reasoning, moot classes and so on, or just the very ‘myth’ that a good lawyer had a certain professional identity.

Richard Owen (University of Glamorgan) reports:

Seow Hon outlined her ongoing research into how legal education and law school impacts on students’ moral development and conception of professional identity. She started by outlining the socio-political context – Singapore has a common law, adversarial legal system with a fused legal profession, and lawyers have a poor image amongst the general public. The government lays emphasis on racial harmony, and levels of political engagement are generally low.

204 LLB students were surveyed (67 interviewed) at the start of their studies at law school, with 196 students surveyed again at the end of the first year. 60 (out of the original 67) were further interviewed at the start of the second year. The first interview aimed to establish how students reason, while the second aimed in addition to establish how and why their conclusions had changed over the course of their first year of study. Seow Hon intends to survey again at the end of the third year.

The survey covered the following topics:

• student profile – the students’ personal values and moral convictions, their reasons for studying law and their aspirations
• scope – lawyers and their professionalism, the law’s relation to justice, morality and other social phenomena, expectations of legal education

The main reasons the students put forward for studying law were money, job security and altruism. The majority (53.9%) envisaged working in private practice in the first five years after graduation, with 11.8% aspiring to work in the public sector legal service and a further 2% in other law related jobs in the public sector. 41.2% rated themselves 4 out of 5 in terms of social consciousness. Issues of particular interest to them were social justice and poverty, world affairs and politics. 50.5% saw the possibility of future involvement in politics, public service or public interest jobs.

The majority (63%) said they had not and would not affect someone’s life or wellbeing for profit, however 40.2 % thought that being a lawyer might require them to do so. The number who thought their legal practice would not affect someone in that way declined from 18.4% to 13.2% after the first year. The majority had moderately held religious (53.6%) and moral (55.5%) convictions, although these declined slightly over the course of the first year.

Lawyers and professionalism – in answer to the question: Can a lawyer do good? 82% said yes – a rise from 81.1% at the start of the year. One respondent said:

“I can stand up for the things that are not ‘popular’ or ‘glamorous’. I can represent the interests of those who would not have any other way to get redress.”

• 55.4% of respondents rated intellectual ability as the most important trait in a lawyer, followed by integrity (33.3%) and honesty (23.6%)
• 31.5% saw a lawyer as primarily an advocate for truth and justice (a decline from the initial 32.1%)
• the second most popular perception was that the lawyer is a legal technician at 24.7% (25%), and thirdly, a counsellor 17.1% (16.8%)
• 76% (75.5%) thought there was a professional duty to raise a technicality, with 8.3% (9.2%) thinking there was no such duty
• 30.4% (33.7%) would help a client get off on a technicality, while 39.7% (24.5%) would not
• far fewer students (10.3%) were prepared to act for a retailer against a vulnerable old lady than act for the same client against a young executive (75%)

When asked whether lawyers are just extensions of their client in an unfamiliar technical domain, 39.2% (35.2%) thought they retained moral autonomy, with one student saying:

“The profession demands a sort of detachment; it demands that personal moral beliefs sometimes have to be subtracted out of the equation.”

Law and justice, morality etc – the survey asked for reactions to a number of laws, for example requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, which might be said to curb the freedom of the individual. An increasing majority of 55.5% (45.4%) thought that judges should say that manifestly unjust laws that the legislature tries to pass are not laws.

Expectations of legal education:

• 100% (98.5%) expected law school to teach them general writing, speaking and analytical skills
• 97% (90.8%) expected to be taught professional skills
• 71% (43.9%) expected to be taught a passion for truth
• 36% (64.8%) expected to be taught justice and fairness
• 37.3% (28.1%) expected to be taught good moral convictions

At this stage in the research there are some grounds for thinking that legal education makes students more relativistic. The following comments demonstrate this:

• There are always two points of view and…they may seem…equally weighty…both parties have different points of view but…they may be equally good…it depends on how you argue it.
• Classes expose to nuances, conflicting interests and duties, and other points of view.

Seow Hon was asked if she will continue the survey after students have finished their studies. She said it was possible that it would be continued after the students have entered private practice, as well as within a clinical setting. An article on other aspects of the research will appear in a forthcoming edition of The Law Teacher.

It was also considered whether there would have been similar responses if the survey had been conducted elsewhere. Apparently, similar research has been conducted at Harvard, but the findings were not discussed in any detail.

Seow Hon was asked if there had been any evidence that students’ integrity might be affected by appearing in capital cases, and in particular would they be prepared to lie in order to ensure an acquittal in such a case? Seow Hon said that the most striking issue that emerged in relation to capital crimes is that students feel that the death penalty in Singapore for drug trafficking is unfair.

About Seow Hon

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Seow Hon Tan is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, where she teaches a first year core module (Introduction to legal theory) and two upper year electives (Jurisprudence and International commercial litigation).
 
She was a Landon Gammon Fellow at Harvard Law School from 1998-99 and a Clark Byse Fellow from 2003-04, where she designed and taught a seven session workshop on ‘Law and morality: a critical examination of natural law theory in a pluralist world’. She was a winner of the National University of Singapore’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2005-06.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010