On Teaching Legal Ethics With Stories About Clients

The comparison I have in mind is between what goes on at Notre Dame and what goes on in one of Professor James Boyd White\u27s law and literature classes at the University of Michigan. Both classes use provocation. White provokes his students with an array of assigned readings, all of them about people, not all of them about law, ranging from Homer and Plato to Fowler on the split infinitive and the autobiography of Dick Gregory. We provoke our students with a parade of accounts from our members, accounts of people they think they can help. White\u27s enterprise is, I think, a beautiful example of the late Dean Edward Levi\u27s description of good legal education as graduate education in liberal arts. I am suggesting that good legal education might also include consideration of real clients. I propose comparisons under these headings: Relationships, Language, Disruption, Translation, and Anthropology

The Gentleman in Professional Ethics

The character of the “gentlemen” has served as a basis for ethics in professionalism. The purpose of this article is to describe the gentleman’s ethics, to explain its implications on the legal profession, to test its adequacy, and to argue that the gentleman’s ethic veered wrong by moving away from its religious tradition. In particular, the author analyzes its adequacy by engaging in four tests including (1) whether the gentleman’s ethic survives conceptions of class and professionalism; (2) whether it provides the skills needed for dealing with power and institutions; (3) whether it takes into account the “tragic nature of the moral life”’ and (4) whether it gives adequate consideration to suffering

Character and Community: Rispetto as a Virtue in the Tradition of Italian-American Lawyers

Our project is to contemplate a discrete piece of applied ethics in the American legal profession, a piece of what one might call Italian-American legal ethics. We propose to describe a moral value for which we will use the Italian word rispetto. Our understanding of rispetto is that it is a virtue, a good habit, through which the person learns, practices, teaches, and remembers his place within the family. We will argue here that the practice of this virtue will allow a modern lawyer to be in and of his or her civic and professional community without loss of dignity and a sense of self