Virtue Ethics and Legal Education

Last week I was in England to participate in the First International Conference on Lawyers' Ethics, which brought together academics from around the world to discuss theoretical, regulatory, and educational perspectives on professionalism. I was struck by the dominant role that virtue ethics, and morality-driven concepts more broadly, played in many of the presentations. Richard Tur (Oxford) framed the challenge of legal ethics as showing "how anyone living in the law can construct a principled image of self and calling out of the various rules and regulations that govern the legal professions while retaining independence and judgment and thereby . . . contribute . . . to the moral development of the legal professions." Adrian Evans (Monash Univ. - Australia) framed his entire approach around the question: "Can values education 'transform' legal ethics education to make it more effective?" Don Nicolson (University of Strathclyde - UK) argued that "it is not enough that ethical rules tell lawyers how to behave and that lawyers are aware of and understand these rules," for lawyers must also be "motivated to follow the rules and also to follow their moral consciences," and be "sufficiently committed to acting morally in the face of the many counter-pressures that characterise contemporary legal practice." One scholar who takes a deontological, role-differentiated approach to lawyering even lamented the seeming takeover by the virtue ethicists.

There is not nearly as much discussion of values education or virtue ethics in American law schools (Tom Shaffer and his followers being the notable exceptions), which may be attributable, most charitably, to the regulation-heavy approach to lawyering that American law students are responsible for learning. From what I gather, foreign jurisdictions have less "developed" regulatory schemes in that regard. Further, legal ethics is a more recent addition to the academy outside the U.S., where the field received a jump start thanks to the lawyer-dominated scandal of Watergate. As such, it remains to be seen whether or not international legal ethicists will eventually lose sight of the big picture via the academy's tendency toward hyperspecialization and navel-gazing, or whether they will persist in their insistence that virtue has something to do with ethics.

Rob