Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

Professional Responsibility 293
gets a sense of how his or her individual original story compares with the stories of others and how a small group
of fellow students assessed that event. The activity underlines one of the key themes of the course: ethics is a
communal activity to which we all relate.
In addition, students begin the class by doing something that is both personal and professional. They talk
about real events but in the context of professional ethics. They get to know something about each other’s values
and how their fellow students see things.
Each week, I present a new problem for the students to work on. Sometimes I pull an ethics-related item from
the day’s newspaper. For example, I recently gave them a copy of a news item in which the DA congratulated the
police department for apprehending a suspect after a thorough investigation that included the finding of a fingerprint
that matched the suspect. The DA said she looked forward to prosecuting this suspect. I did not tell the
students whether I thought there was an ethical problem or, if there were one, what it might be. The students,
meeting in small groups, were to decide that issue for themselves. I asked them to write a rule and to analyze the
rule using the three criteria. Only when the discussion and analysis were complete did we refer to the class text.
I (nearly) always have the students count off when forming groups. For example, with 32 students, I divide up
the class into eight groups of three students and two groups of four students. With 64 students — or more — I
teach the class twice. I think ethics is too important to teach by mass lecture.
When taught this way, the course requires a fair amount of time during the semester reading student papers.
I assign four journal entries per student of 300 to 500 words each. I also assign a term paper in which I ask them
to relate their religious or spiritual beliefs, however defined, to their personal ethical code. On the other hand,
my final exam is brief because I already know by then so much about each student.
Getting Students Onboard
Steve Hartwell, University of San Diego School of Law
The biggest challenge in teaching Professional Responsibility, at least where it is taught as a required upperlevel
course, is getting students to buy into it. Many students arrive at the class resentful that they have to endure
an ethics course. To those of us who care deeply about legal ethics, this comes as a shock the first time we experience
it; the centrality of this material to a legal education seems obvious to us. But we quickly learn that most
of our students do not come to the topic with the same enthusiasm.
Therefore, our most important objective on the first day of class— far more important than coverage or thematic
introductions— should be to have students leave class thinking, “Hey, this stuff is interesting. And it’s important
to me as a future lawyer. I actually have thoughts about it and need to think about it more.” I am convinced
that we can achieve this in the first class, and while we’re at it, we can sneak in some of those thematic introductions,
historical background, and even some law. I will describe my own method, but the details of my approach
are less important than the idea that we need a plan for day one to accomplish the buy-in as our primary goal.
I use the famous dead-bodies case, People v. Belge, but I do not assign it as reading prior to the first class. Instead,
at the start of class, I offer the story as a hypothetical: four young campers in the Adirondacks, their disappearance,
two bodies discovered, a suspect charged with murder, two young women still missing. “You are appointed
to represent the defendant,” I say. “You meet with your client, and he tells you that he killed all four, and
he tells you where he hid the remaining bodies. You go to the spot and find the bodies. Meanwhile, the parents
are still desperately searching for their missing daughters, not knowing whether they are alive or dead. They come
to your office and ask whether you have any information that can help them. What do you do?”
This generates a number of ideas from the class, some of which raise provocative issues. A consensus often develops
around the idea that it would be wrong to reveal what the client told us. At this point, I acknowledge that
there are rules that govern lawyer conduct, and I direct the students to their Model Rules supplement. I ask them
for rules that seem useful here, and someone quickly figures out that this is a confidentiality issue and finds Rule