Learning to be a Prison Educator

This paper explores the process by which instructors learn to teach in prison. First, research on the challenges correctional educators encounter is explored. Second, an instructor training and mentorship program developed in Alberta, Canada will be presented, followed by a discussion of the importance on ongoing professional development that is specific to correctional educators

A Perspecive on Temper in the Court: A Forum on Judicial Civility

This Essay focuses on the issue of judicial civility, which is not about the merits of any particular decision or an improvement in decision-making, but an aim to improve the tone of justice in the courts. Despite the fact that the Code of Judicial Conduct mandates temperance as part of a judge\u27s job, abusive judge behavior has become too common

Enforcing Courtesy: Default Judgments and the Civility Movement

We have much less of a sense of shared values than we used to have. There was a common understanding of how you acted. You zealously represented your client, but you had respect for the other side and treated them with dignity. Afterward, you\u27d all go out for a drink. Can we ever again achieve this level of professionalism? I hope so

Practicing Civility in the Legal Writing Course: Helping Law Students Learn Professionalism

This Article suggests some concrete ways to teach civility— one component of professionalism—to law students. Professionalism certainly includes much more than civility, incorporating the concepts of ethics, morals, public service, life-long learning, personal integrity, professional identity, and a commitment to selfdevelopment. This Article begins with a brief overview of civility in Part I. Part II provides a few of the many arguments for why we should teach law students to be civil. Part III explores some concrete ways in which we can teach civility within individual classes, using the dynamics of student engagement in the classroom as an opportunity to identify goals, practice, and receive feedback

Being Good Lawyers: A Relational Approach to Law Practice

In response to past generations of debates regarding whether law is a business or profession, we advance an alternative approach that rejects the dichotomies of business and profession, or hired gun and wise counselor. Instead, we propose a relational account of law practice. Unlike frameworks grounded in assumptions of atomistic individualism or communitarianism, a relational perspective recognizes that all actors, whether individuals or organizations, have separate identities yet are intrinsically inter-connected and cannot maximize their own good in isolation. Through the lens of relational self-interest, maximizing the good of the individual or business requires consideration of the good of the neighbor, the employee or customer, and of the public. Accordingly, relational lawyers advise and assist clients, colleagues, and themselves to take into account the well-being of others when contemplating and pursuing their own interests. A relational approach to law practice does not require a choice between labeling law a business or a profession, and indeed is consistent with both perspectives. Lawyers can access relational perspectives from a wide range of understandings of the lawyer’s role, with the exception of the particular hired gun ideology that views lawyers as amoral mouthpieces for clients who act as Holmesian bad men and women aggressively pursuing their self-interest with no regard to others. The relational framework offers all lawyers, whether they see themselves as professionals or business persons, a framework for understanding that they can continue to serve as society’s civic teachers in their capacity as intermediaries between the people and the law, integrating relational self-interest into their representation of clients and their community service. By doing so, lawyers as professionals, individuals, and community members will more effectively represent clients, as well as enhance their contribution to the public good and to the quality of their own professional and private lives. They will also surmount the generation-long malaise resulting from the crisis of professionalism