The goal of this course is to ask what it means to be an ethical lawyer, to practice law and live with integrity. Students are challenged to find their own ethical and moral voices and to make the decisions they will face in the practice of law consciously. Much of the reading for the course is in the form of stories, both fiction and nonfiction. Students also read legal and non-legal scholarship on ethics, morality and cognitive psychology. Through these readings and classroom discussion, students explore their own ethical constructs.





Students consider these issues in two ways. First, students are asked to take positions and make the kind of judgments lawyers make about what clients to take and what strategies to pursue in the course of representation. Students reflect on their judgments and explore other approaches. Second, students are asked to consider situations they have encountered in their lives (often non legal) that challenged their integrity. Students address ethical issues in the way they most frequently arise: in complicated, messy, human interactions, where multiple issues arise at once, where there are often no good answers, and where the Rules of Professional Responsibility provide little or no guidance or require conduct many find difficult to follow.



Students in the course will participate in class discussions and exercises, keep a journal reflecting on the stories and scholarship they read, and write and rewrite a final paper or series of essays, on approved topics of their choice relevant to the course.