Teaching Ethics & Professionalism in First-Year Legal Writing

I have stressed the need for teaching ethics and professionalism in first-year courses.  Legal writing is a particularly good place to teach these subjects.  There is a new article that has several good ideas on incorporating ethics and professionalism into legal writing.

Kristen E. Murray, Legal Writing Missteps: Ethics and Professionalism in the First Year Legal Research and Writing Classroom

Abstract: These days, a lot of legal writing-related mistakes and errors in judgment draw a great deal of media scrutiny and attention — attention that spreads quickly in a digital environment. Legal writing professors have long recognized these as teaching moments, usually in the form of cautionary tales shared with students. More and more, as a community, the legal writing professorate has recognized the importance of integrating ethics and professionalism into the legal writing classroom; indeed in some instances, it is impossible to separate these concepts. Although the ABA requires law students to take a professional responsibility course, and many professors incorporate a discussion of ethics and professional conduct in other courses, these concepts are rarely integrated across the curriculum as key components of a law student’s academic experience.

With this in mind, I decided to try and use practical stories about “legal writing gone bad” to bring a discussion of ethics and professionalism into the first year course in a thoughtful, meaningful way. This article discusses the theoretical basis for incorporating ethics and professionalism in the first year course, and presents an exercise I developed for my first year legal research and writing students called “Legal Writing Missteps.”

(Scott Fruehwald)

P.S. I also have an article on teaching professionalism and ethics in legal writing on SSRN, Legal Writing, Professionalism, and Legal Ethics.