Friday, April 12, 2013
"Bridging the Gap: How Introducing Ethical Skills Exercises Will Enrich Learning in First Year Courses"
This article is by Professors Miriam Albert and Jennifer Gundlach (Hofstra) and is available at 5 Drexel L. Rev. 165 (2012) and here on SSRN. From the abstract:
"These opportunities seem to be entirely unavailable
during the first year of law studies. This is a missed opportunity, since
first-year courses are fertile ground for exposure to principles of
professional responsibility. It is in this time period when students are in the
process of learning foundational lawyering skills. Law faculty who teach
first-year courses face unique challenges as they seek to orient law students
to basic legal methods, analysis, and the concept of doctrinal law stemming
from cases and statutes. The authors’ own teaching experiences and research
have shown that offering students the opportunity to apply doctrine in a
practical context through simulated client interactions leads to a richer and
more complete legal education, which we believe better prepares students for
the ethical and competent practice of law. As part of these simulations,
students are given a chance to experiment with foundational lawyering skills
such as client interviewing and counseling, problem-solving, drafting and
synthesis of law and fact. While experimenting with these skills, students will
also wrestle with the types of ethical dilemmas they will face in practice.
We share one approach of how a Contracts professor and a Lawyers’ Ethics
professor are responding to these challenges in a first-year classroom and offer
theoretical and practical support for the notion that providing students with
the opportunity to develop and hone essential lawyering skills through
simulations within the context of a doctrinal class will better prepare our
students for the ethical and competent practice of law.
The Article offers support for the integration of ethical considerations into
the first year of law school generally. We examine the learning objectives
sought to be satisfied through the integration of ethics and contracts, and
provide a description of this problem-centered exercise usable in any first
year contracts class, with the fact pattern and other supporting documentation
necessary to run the simulation attached as Appendices. The Article concludes
with anecdotal results from the authors’ use of this exercise, and suggestions
for assessment tools for faculty to use in evaluating the exercise."
(jbl).
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2013/04/bridging-the-gap-how-introducing-ethical-skills-exercises-will-enrich-learning-in-first-year-courses.html