Pedagogy Without Purpose: An Essay on Professional Responsibility Courses and Casebooks

The involvement of so many attorneys in the Watergate scandal caused the bar to wonder how to better train ethical lawyers. The American Bar Association instituted an accreditation requirement that law schools compel their students to take a professional responsibility course. Additionally, many states began requiring passage of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination as a condition for admission to the bar. These actions, however, were taken with little thought about how legal ethics should be studied. Rather, the assumption has been that a lawyer is ethical if he or she knows the Code of Professional Responsibility and can demonstrate that knowledge on a multiple choice test. I believe that such an approach to professional responsibility, emphasizing just learning the Code, is largely useless. Memorizing a few rules has little relation to ethical practice. In fact, such an approach is counterproductiveinstead of encouraging students to consider the difficult issues confronting all lawyers, it lets them feel content merely to learn a handful of canons and disciplinary rules. To illustrate how pervasive this approach to legal ethics is, and how empty, I want to focus on three major casebooks on professional responsibility that have been published in the past two years. They are selected because they are extensively used and therefore likely reflect how professional responsibility