Ethics

I recently had lunch with several professors who teach legal ethics at Fordham, and was struck by the variety of the course offerings they had.  That prompted me to use the free version of the Survey Monkey site to poll UC-Berkeley law students about what legal ethics courses they might like.  Using a menu of 12 possible choices, I asked ???If all the following courses were offered at Boalt, which legal ethics courses would you seriously consider taking? (Check all that apply.)???  128 students voted.  Here???s the rank ordering of the most popular responses:

Some more comments below the jump.

Here are some thoughts.

1.         In the box for comments, some students asked for a course that took a critical stance on legal ethics.  I have twice taught ???Critical Views of the Legal Profession??? and so I regret that I didn???t incorporate that possibility into the survey.

2.         I wonder if there wasn???t a bias in the sample, given that the East Bay Community Law Center clinic students didn???t receive my email about the survey, and given that the students who sign up for my class probably understand that I???m from the private law firm setting.  I did post the survey address at the Nuts & Boalts blog.  Whether or not that affected results, I cannot say.  But 128 students is a fair chunk of the school population and I appreciate their participation.

3.         The votes reflect the view I often hear in class: ???most of us are headed into private practice firms and will do a lot of civil pre-trial procedure.???  The 5 most popular responses are consistent with that view.

4.         If we look at types of work (and not practice setting), civil litigation and trial practice were more requested than other types.  I certainly understand why civil litigation was popular, but was a bit surprised about trial practice.  Not too many of my student go into a true trial practice, and trials are rare in civil litigation.  In the Spring 2008 semester, I offered ???Legal Ethics in Trial Practice,??? and the students were dominated by mock trial competitors and future criminal law practitioners.

5.         The support for a ???moral foundations??? course surprised me a little, because I so often hear the students say that they want a practice-oriented course.  Several years ago I offered a course on ???Philosophy and Legal Practice??? and the attendance was modest.  Perhaps ???Moral Foundations??? is a different, and more appealing, approach to the topic.

6.         Most of the courses devoted to particular practice areas enjoyed some support, but well below 50%.  My (wildly speculative) guess is that if we measure the number of law students heading into practice areas and then compared those results to the ethics specialty courses offered around the country, we would find that ethics in business transactions is the most under-covered specialty ethics course in US law schools.

7.        I was surprised by the seemingly modest number of votes for ethics in social justice practice, especially because that is the one specialty course that students have urgently asked for over the years.  (I have drawn up a syllabus for that course and am looking for a chance to teach it.)  But, given the total number of students headed into that practice, perhaps 21% isn???t really surprising after all. 

            I wondered if those 21% of the students were different than other students, so I did a little more analysis.  I compared them to students who voted for the Private Practice course.  Here???s the comparative size of the groups.  Notice that nearly half of the students didn???t vote for either the Private Practice (PP) or Social Justice (SJ) course.

Let???s look more closely at the 60% who voted for at least one or the other.  For four courses, the PP students and the SJ students voted essentially the same.  (Note: the SJ-students??? votes are first in the second column.)

Here are the courses where the PP-students and SJ-students differed, in descending order from the course that was most heavily weighted toward SJ-students.

8.         As for the students who didn???t vote for PP or SJ, I could spot a few patterns.  Some voted only for the most general courses.  Some, perhaps especially the LLM students, voted for the survey course and the Comparative/Globalization course.  Some voted for just one specialty area.

9.  If you have thoughts or questions, feel free to contact me at john.steele@fr.com.