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Law School Instruction in Professional Responsibility: A Curricular Paradox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

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Abstract

Legal ethics has recently become the focus of professional and public concern. One aspect of that concern has to do with the education and socialization of law students in professional responsibility. This study, using data from a sample of law students in diverse school settings, examines the influence of prevailing learning norms in legal education on student responses to courses in professional responsibility. The author also reviews the bases of ambiguous sentiments about the role of education in professional ethics and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties and dilemmas involved in attempts to alter the established mode of instruction.

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Research Article
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Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1979 

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References

1 The concept of reciprocity between a profession's status and the public's trust in its members is implicit in the traditional model of professions. See William J. Goode, Community Within a Community: The Professions, 22 Am. Soc. Rev. 194 (1957); id., Encroachment, Charlatanism, and the Emerging Profession: Psychology, Sociology, and Medicine, 25 Am. Soc. Rev. 902 (1960); Roscoe Pound, The Lawyer from Antiquity to Modern Times 4–10 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1953); Ernest Greenwood, Attributes of a Profession, Soc. Work, July 1957, at 44. However, it is most fully developed by Everett C. Hughes. Hughes observed that free professions must actively cultivate public trust because their services are voluntarily sought and their ministrations must be voluntarily accepted. Consequently, trust in a profession is essential for that profession to apply its expertise and to prove its social worth. Everett C. Hughes, Professions, in Kenneth S. Lynn, ed., The Professions in America 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Also see Everett Cherrington Hughes, Men and Their Work (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958). There are dissenting views to the traditional model. On a profession's status, Freidson wrote: “A profession attains and maintains its position by virtue of the protection and patronage of some elite segment of society which has been persuaded that there is some special value in its work. Its position is thus secured by the political and economic influence of the elite which sponsors it.” Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge 72 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970). By implication, professions jeopardize their status only when they displease patron elites or when their patrons lose power. While the clientele may differ in this model, the consequences of failing trust are similar. Also see Becker, Howard S., The Career of the Chicago Public Schoolteacher, Am. J. Soc. 57 470 (1952); Robert W. Habenstein, Critique of “Profession” as a Sociological Category, 4 Soc. Q. 291 (1963); and Douglas Klegon, The Sociology of Professions: An Emerging Perspective, Soc. Work & Occupations, Aug. 1978, at 259.Google Scholar

2 American Bar Association, Approval of Law Schools: American Bar Association Standards and Rules of Procedures, as Amended—1977, at $ 302(a)(iii) (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1977).Google Scholar

3 Alfred Zantzinger Reed, Present-Day Law Schools in the United States and Canada, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Bulletin no. 21 (New York: Carnegie Foundation, 1928). Reed also noted, however, that some schools, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, and Stanford, did not teach such a course on the theory that “it is a fallacy to assume that high ethical standards can be inculcated either by general exhortations or by case method drill in legal etiquette.”Id. at 255 n.3.Google Scholar

4 LeRoy L. Lamborn, Legal Education and Professional Responsibility: A Survey of Current Methods of Instruction in American Law Schools 3 (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1963).Google Scholar

5 E.g., see Donald T. Weckstein, Watergate and the Law Schools, 12 San Diego L. Rev. 261 (1975); Andrew S. Watson, The Watergate Lawyer Syndrome: An Educational Deficiency Disease, 26 J. Legal Educ. 441 (1974); Charles Frankel, Review, Code of Professional Responsibility, 43 U. Chi. L. Rev. 874 (1976); Richard Wasserstrom, Lawyers as Professionals: Some Moral Issues, 5 Human Rights 1 (1975). Jeb Stuart Magruder explained his participation in the Watergate scandal as a consequence of not being offered ethics courses in college. Noted in William J. Bennett, Ethics and the Legal Profession, in Professional Responsibility: A Guide for Attorneys 337, 346 (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1978).Google Scholar

6 Leon Jaworski, President's Page, 58 A.B.A.J. 667, 750 (1972). Also see K. C. Cole Janssen, “We'll Murder Them in August”: Who Decides How Ethics Should Be Taught? Juris Doctor, July/Aug. 1974, at 19. Other professions have also recently experienced comparable events of ethical rupture. For the military, it was the Vietnam war. Monitors of socialization in that profession have also focused on the education of initiates as the appropriate point for special effort: A struggle to eliminate what many senior officers believe to be a moral rot that has infected the Army since the Vietnam War is to begin here in the classrooms of the United States Military Academy. Lieut. Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, the superintendent, has included morals and ethics courses in the academy's new four-year curriculum. These, he believes, will produce officers better qualified to deal with the “corruption” that he says afflicted the Army in the last stages of the war. Drew Middleton, West Point Seeks to Eliminate Moral “Corruption” in Army Enlistees, N.Y. Times, Aug. 6, 1978.Google Scholar

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10 Medical education has also been characterized as compelling students to deal with uncertainty. This is justified on the basis that the practice of medicine demands that practitioners be able to cope both with the limitations of medical knowledge and their inability to master the scope and detail of available knowledge. See Renee C. Fox, Training for Uncertainty, in Robert K. Merton, George G. Reader, & Patricia L. Kendall, eds., The Student-Physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education 207 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). Similar claims are made about legal education: The corpus of law cannot be mastered by an individual in three years, if ever; legal practice also has diagnostic and predictive uncertainties; and the ability to reduce factual complexities to manageable legal tasks is a skill learned only through long and arduous work in murky environments. Lacey and Phillips wrote: In an increasingly complex modern society, with the accretion of ever more power and authority to national, state and local governments and institutions, the business of the lawyer is to obtain an explanation that he and his client can understand. Doing so requires the same kind of dogged, persistent and stubborn intellectual prodding of lethargic and largely indifferent social institutions that hopefully takes place day after day in the law school classroom. Forrest W. Lacey & Jerry J. Phillips, Trumpeting the Virtues of Traditional Legal Education, 2 Learning & L. 23, 56 (1975). Another explanation for law schools' lack of elaborate guides to student behavior is that uncertainty facilitates socialization. In preparing for class, the usual student technique of reading for point or mood rather than trifling detail becomes—it is learned from class—an improper technique. The very thing left out of preparation is said to be the thing needed, and vitally needed. Once again, the need for recognition of academic competence surfaces and students grow compulsive, scrapping their old economies of action, studying longer, reading more slowly, underlining everything, taking more notes or even copying whole sections of casebooks, or memorizing material, as to be “thoroughly prepared” and not a target of academic ridicule…. In the foregoing ways, the pleasant haze is burned off, people become dissatisfied with their home worlds or presenting cultures and become amenable to the institution's culture and its privilege system. John J. Bonsignore, Law as a Hard Science: On the Madness in the Method, Am. Legal Stud. F., Dec. 1977, at 47, 72. For similar perspectives see, Wilbert E. Moore, The Professions: Roles and Rules 77 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970); Paul N. Savoy, Toward a New Politics of Legal Education, 79 Yale L.J. 444, 480 (1970); Bernard L. Diamond, Psychological Problems of Law Students, in Stephen Gillers, ed., Looking at Law School 19 (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1977); Charles E. Silberman, Educational Trends and the Law, in Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc., ed., Selected Readings in Clinical Legal Education 139 (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility and the International Legal Center, 1973).Google Scholar

11 The point here is essentially a Kuhnian one. Law teaching, like all disciplinary training, imposes a distinctive paradigm on the knowledge inquiry. The paradigm defines the language, perspective, appropriateness of questions, and the avenues of progress for participants. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). T row describes training in law's paradigm as learning to speak “Legal”: It's obvious, in looking back, that one of the things which made me feel most at sea initially was the fact that I barely understood much of what I was reading and hearing. Before we'd left for the East, one California lawyer-friend advised me to remember that in many ways a legal education was just the learning of a second language. What we were going through seemed like a kind of Berlitz assault in “Legal,” a language I didn't speak and in which I was being forced to read and think sixteen hours a day. Of course Legal bore some relation to English—it was more a dialect than a second tongue—but it was very peculiar. Scott Turow, One L, at 57 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977).Google Scholar

12 Comment, Anxiety and the First Semester of Law School, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 1201; Michael J. Patton, The Student, the Situation, and Performance During the First Year of Law School, 21 J. Legal Educ. 10, 34–35 (1968); Barry B. Boyer & Roger C. Cramton, American Legal Education: An Agenda for Research and Reform, 59 Cornell L. Rev. 221, 261 (1974).Google Scholar

13 Jon Richardson, Does Anyone Care for More Hemlock? 25 J. Legal Educ. 427 (1973); Duncan Kennedy, How the Law School Fails: A Polemic, Yale Rev. L. & Soc. Act., Spring 1970, at 71; Savoy, supra note 10.Google Scholar

14 Robert Stevens, Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Va. L. Rev. 551, 659–68 (1973); E. Gordon Gee & Donald W. Jackson, Bridging the Gap: Legal Education and Lawyer Competency, 1977 B.Y.U.L. Rev. 695, 927–63.Google Scholar

15 Ronald M. Pipkin, Legal Education: The Consumers' Perspective, 1976 A.B.F. Res. J. 1161, 1186–87; Roy E. Rickson, Faculty Control and the Structure of Student Competition: An Analysis of the Law Student Role, 25 J. Legal Educ. 47 (1973); Comment, supra note 12.Google Scholar

16 The terms “manifest” and “latent” are adaptations of Merton's concepts of manifest and latent functions. See Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure 73–138 (enlarged ed. New York: Free Press, 1968). However, Merton defines latent to mean unrecognized organizational consequences. Here the term is used somewhat differently. The lack of recognition of the latent curriculum is only its lack of official recognition, not that participants are unaware of it. Perhaps, the latent curriculum could be better understood as a not-so-hidden agenda in legal education.Google Scholar

17 For a report on courses in professional responsibility in law schools' manifest curricula, see Goldberg, supra note 7.Google Scholar

18 Roger C. Cramton, The Ordinary Religion of the Law School Classroom, 29 J. Legal Educ. 247 (1978); James R. Elkins, Imagination and Creativity in Lawyering: A Report on a Law School Seminar, 3 Am. Legal Stud. F., May 1978, at 13.Google Scholar

19 Dan C. Lortie, Laymen to Lawmen: Law School, Careers, and Professional Socialization, 29 Harv. Educ. Rev. 352 (1959).Google Scholar

20 Howard S. Becker, Personal Change in Adult Life, Sociometry, Mar. 1964, at 40.Google Scholar

21 The coding scheme used to classify courses by title is a modified version of that given in the appendix to Donald W. Jackson & E. Gordon Gee, Bread and Butter? Electives in American Legal Education (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc., 1975). The authors of that study developed their codebook using the catalogs of 106 law schools. The categories are: administrative law; constitutional law; advanced constitutional, administrative and discrimination law; basic property law; advanced property, real estate and finance; corporation law, business institutions and finance; advanced corporation law and corporate reorganization; commercial law; advanced commercial law, consumer and creditors' rights; basic civil procedure; conflict of laws and advanced civil procedure; contract law; criminal law; advanced criminal law and procedure; evidence: trusts and estates; estate planning; family and juvenile law; federal practice and procedure; interdisciplinary; international law; advanced international and comparative law; labor law; advanced labor law; land use planning and control; law and social issues; professional responsibility and legal profession; legal history, jurisprudence and legal philosophy; legislative process; environmental law; patent and copyright law; trial practice and advanced appellate advocacy; trade regulations and antitrust; security regulations and advanced trade regulations; remedies; municipal law; basic taxation; advanced taxation; torts; advanced torts; legal method and legal process; insurance; accounting; and miscellaneous.Google Scholar

22 Supra note 2.Google Scholar

23 Background information on instructors was taken from Association of American Law Schools, Directory of Law Teachers (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1975). *p≥ .05. The mean for courses on professional responsibility is at a confidence interval greater than ± 1.96 standard deviation from the mean of the other courses. aTo standardize the comparisons across scales, a percent mean change value was computed by the formula (x of others - x of prof. resp.)/x of prof. resp. bThe sign was reversed for the variable “rank in time” to account for the reverse order of this scale.Google Scholar

24 On other measures, which for reasons of parsimony and redundancy are not included in this presentation, courses on professional responsibility were also shown to be substantially below average in reports of student attendance, class preparation, and standing in course work. They were also below average in measures of student interest and enjoyment. As well, while students reported a greater ability to follow classroom discussion in these courses compared to the average, they were substantially less willing to anticipate that discussion or volunteer to speak in class. The only positive evaluation of courses on professional responsibility was that they were not anxiety provoking.Google Scholar

25 See Stevens, supra note 14; Pipkin, supra note 15; Gregory J. Rathjen, The Impact of Legal Education on the Beliefs, Attitudes and Values of Law Students, 44 Tenn. L. Rev. 85 (1976); Walter Gellhorn, The Second and Third Years of Law Study, 17 J. Legal Educ. 1 (1964). *p .05 **p .01 *p .05 *p .01 aTo simplify interpretation of the relationships to rank, the signs on correlations and βs were reversed.Google Scholar

26 Herbert L. Packer & Thomas Ehrlich, New Directions in Legal Education 31 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972).Google Scholar

27 Why one method is selected over the other may be particular to the instructor, the subject matter, or students' responsiveness. Socratic dialogue requires the willing participation of students. If they resist responding or are frequently unprepared, as is commonly complained to be the case after the first year, instructors may be pressed to lecture. Also, the socratic method may be found by some to be too ponderous and repetitive to best communicate the substantive content of a course. See id. at 30.Google Scholar

28 Once again this raises a Kuhnian point; see note 11 supra. Instruction can be in the form of either foreclosing nonparadigmatic inquiry—not entertaining those questions that challenge law's world view and concepts of reality—or as opening the paradigm for critique. Critics of legal education have argued that it does only the former. See Eric E. Van Loon, The Law School Response: How to Make Students Sharp by Making Them Narrow, in Bruce Wasserstein & Mark J. Green, eds., With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates 334 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); David N. Rockwell, The Education of the Capitalist Lawyer: The Law School, in Robert Lefcourt, ed., Law Against the People: Essays to Demystify the Law, Order and the Courts 90 (New York: Random House, 1971); Peter D'Errico, 'The Law Is Terror Put into Words': A Humanist's Analysis of the Increasing Separation Between Concerns of Law and Concerns of Justice, 2 Learning & L. 38 (1975); Wythe Holt, Why American Law Schools Cannot Teach Justice, Am. Legal Stud. F., Sept. 1978, at 5; Bonsignore, supra note 10. One distinction between lecture and discussion is that the latter provides greater opportunity for paradigmatic challenges. However, the opportunity is not necessarily taken. To the extent that participants accept the paradigm as controlling, classroom inquiry is likely to be in terms of elaboration and applications of the prevailing perspective only. See John J. Bonsignore, Existentialism, the Rule of Law and Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, 8 Am. Bus. L.J. 133 (1970). Note: The statistic used for the determination of statistical significance was the student t-difference of means test. Ns equal number of students in each course group. aChange scores computed by the formula in the note to table 1. bThe sign was reversed for the variable “rank in time” to account for the reverse order of this scale.Google Scholar

29 See Weckstein, supra note 5, at 630; Judge Stecher's comments in Galston, supra note 8, at 152–53; Eric Schnapper, The Myth of Legal Ethics, 64 A.B.A.J. 202 (1978).Google Scholar

30 Schnapper, supra note 29, at 205.Google Scholar

31 Orville G. Brim, Jr., Socialization Through the Life Cycle, in Orville G. Brim & Stanton Wheeler, Socialization After Childhood 1 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966). Also see discussion in June Louin Tapp & Felice J. Levine, Legal Socialization: Strategies for Ethical Legality, 27 Stan. L. Rev. 1, 62 (1974).Google Scholar

32 Legal education seems to incorporate aspects of both childhood and adult socialization; that is, it provides students with a core of attitudes, values, and norms about how a lawyer should behave and, as well, information about specific role demands. These qualitative differences in types of socialization may underlie many of the tensions in legal education and disagreements about what law school is capable of doing. This point has also been noted in medical education. See Ann G. Olmsted & Marianne A. Paget, Some Theoretical Issues in Professional Socialization, 44 J. Med. Educ. 633 (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Wagner Perrin Thielens, Jr., The Socialization of Law Students: A Case Study in Three Parts (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965); Rita James Simon, An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Some Curriculum Innovations in Law Schools, 2 J. Applied Behavioral Sci. 219 (1966); Cleopatra Campbell, The Attitudes of First-Year Law Students at the University of New Mexico, 20 J. Legal Educ. 71 (1967); Joseph W. Little, Pawns and Processes: A Quantitative Study of Unknowns in Legal Education, 21 J. Legal Educ. 145 (1968); Walter W. Steele, Jr., A Comparison of Attitudes of Freshmen and Senior Law Students, 23 J. Legal Educ. 318 (1970); Howard S. Erlanger & Douglas A. Klegon, Socialization Effects of Professional School: The Law School Experience and Student Orientations to Public Interest Concerns, 13 Law & Soc'y Rev. 1 (1978). It should be noted, however, that some psychiatrically trained observers have come to a different conclusion. See Andrew s. Watson, Reflections on the Teaching of Criminal Law, 37 U. Detroit L.J. 701 (1960); id., Some Psychological Aspects of Teaching Professional Responsibility, 16 J. Legal Educ. 1 (1963); id., Lawyers and Professionalism: A Further Psychiatric Perspective on Legal Education, 8 U. Mich. J.L. Ref. 248 (1975); Barry A. Goodfield, Do Lawyers Have Problems Being People? 5 Barrister 13 (1978); Diamond, supra note 10.Google Scholar

34 Improved ethical screening was proposed in 1972 by a study committee of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education. One of the recommendations was: “To identify those significant elements of character that may predictably give rise to misconduct in violation of professional responsibilities.” Alan M. Dershowitz, Preventive Disbarment: The Numbers Are Against It, 58 A.B.A.J. 815 (1972). Also see Jaworski, supra note 6.Google Scholar

35 To date, the most comprehensive studies of professional student socialization have been in medical education. See particularly Howard S. Becker et al., Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Merton et al., supra note 10; Samuel W. Bloom, The Sociology of Medical Education: Some Comments on the State of a Field, 43 Milbank Memorial Fund Q. 143 (1965). But these major studies are over 20 years old. No new research of comparable scope is in progress. Renée Fox credits the decline in research on medical education to the increasing influence of theories on contextual determinism. In recent years, … several prominent sociologists of medicine have become critical of the importance that they and their colleagues formerly attached to medical education and socialization. They now contend that the physician's “immediate work environment,” the “exigencies … and realities of practice,” are more significant determinants of the way a man or woman performs in the physician's role than the anticipatory socialization that medical schools supposedly provide. Partly for this reason, they are not enthusiastic about launching studies of becoming a physician in the 1970s and are even less disposed to cast them in the conceptual framework of the 1950s. Insofar as they would be at all willing to conduct research in medical school rather than in medical practice settings, these sociologi ts would lay greater stress on studying the faculty, the social organization of the medical school, and its organization of power than on inquiring into student attitudes, experiences, and culture. Renée C. Fox, Is There a “New” Medical Student? A Comparative View of Medical Socialization in the 1950s and 1970s, in L. Tancredi, ed., Ethics of Health Care 197, 215 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1974).Google Scholar

36 The general belief about professional behavior is that it is governed by an explicit set of norms and values. Codes of professional responsibility are designed to be primarily self-enforcing on the premise that professional selection and socialization in the code's moral elements will be adequate to dispose practitioners toward behaving ethically. However, the view that ethical behavior may be environmentally determined not only challenges the rationality of autonomous action implicit in ethical rules, but it is very unsettling to most professionals' concepts of self. It seems to give credence to the claims of persons held accountable for grossly unethical acts like those that occurred during Watergate or in My Lai or Nazi Germany: they were caught up in the dynamics of the action; they behaved in ways that made sense, perhaps even seemed responsible, in the context but were wholly contrary to their own, as well as society's, ethical standards. As John Dean warned his own lawyer: [A] lot of goddam lawyers have done what I'm afraid you're doing. You're going to fall right in the cover-up trap if you don't start thinking about the implications of this. You know, all these lawyers came into this thing with no worries, and then they started protecting their clients and protecting the President. And the first thing you know they slipped into the cover-up. John Wesley Dean III, Blind Ambition: The White House Years 232 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).Google Scholar

37 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View 6–7 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).Google Scholar

38 See Philip G. Zimbardo, A Pirandellian Prison, N.Y. Times, Apr. 8, 1973 (Magazine), at 38; and Craig Haney & Philip G. Zimbardo, The Socialization into Criminality: On Becoming a Prisoner and a Guard, in June Louin Tapp & Felice J. Levine, eds., Law, Justice, and the Individual in Society 198 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977).Google Scholar

39 Philip G. Zimbardo, The Psychological Power and Pathology of Imprisonment, Statement prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary 5–6 (Subcommittee no. 3, Robert Kastenmeier, Chairman: Hearings on Prison Reform, Oct. 25, 1971).Google Scholar

40 Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers' Ethics: A Survey of the New York City Bar 175 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1966).Google Scholar

41 See Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1928); id., The Child's Conception of the World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929); id., The Psychology of Intelligence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947). And see Lawrence Kohlberg, Moral Development and Identification, in Harold W. Stevenson, ed., Child Psychology: The Sixty-second Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Lawrence Kohlberg, Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization, in David A. Goslin, ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1969).Google Scholar

42 In recent years Tapp and Levine have refined and adapted particularly the Kohlberg typology to issues of law and justice. See especially Tapp & Levine, supra note 31. Their model of legal reasoning and legal development specifically focuses on the individual's role in and relationship to systems of law. For ease of presentation in this section, however, the term “moral development” is used broadly to include this work on legal reasoning and legal valuation processes as well.Google Scholar

43 Summarized in June Louin Tapp & Lawrence Kohlberg, Developing Senses of Law and Legal Justice, in Tapp & Levine, supra note 38, at 91. See also Tapp & Levine, supra note 31.Google Scholar

44 Tapp & Kohlberg, supra note 43.Google Scholar

45 Indeed, this was Kohlberg's finding in an examination of the moral development of participants in the Milgram experiment. Kohlberg, Stage, supra note 41.Google Scholar

46 Felice J. Levine & June Louin Tapp, The Dialectic of Legal Socialization in Community and School, in Tapp & Levine, supra note 38, at 163, 167.Google Scholar

47 Id. at 174–76. About law training, the authors wrote: “The point is simple: While the development of legal competence requires substantive information, the acquisition of knowledge alone is insufficient for stimulating integrative, accommodative, and critical thought.”Id. at 174.Google Scholar

48 See Jerome Frank, Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School, 81 U. Pa. L. Rev. 907 (1933); Alan A. Stone, Legal Education on the Couch, 85 Harv. L. Rev. 392 (1971); Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, supra note 10; Watson, Lawyers, supra note 33; Murray Teigh Bloom, ed., Lawyers, Clients & Ethics (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, 1974); David R. Barnhizer, The Clinical Method of Legal Instruction: Its Theory and Implementation, 30 J. Legal Educ. 67 (1979).Google Scholar

49 See Gorovitz & Miller, supra note 8; Robert H. Aronson, New Dimensions in Legal Ethics, 2 Learning & L. 50 (1975). New approaches have also included computer teaching of ethics: see Roger Park, Drill on Code of Professional Responsibility (University of Minnesota Computer Center, 1978). However, the limits of this pedagogy based on rote memorization of rules (and perhaps the irony of learning ethics from a machine) have not escaped the author—see Roger Park & Russell Burris, Computer-aided Instruction in Law: Theories, Techniques, and Trepidations, 1978 A.B.F. Res. J. 1, 25 n.39.Google Scholar

50 In a radical critique of recent developments in legal education, Bankowski and Mungham have argued that the primary beneficiaries, and the force behind these developments, are the young and the less-than-well-credentialed law faculty who, because of stagnation and closure in traditional subject areas, need new arenas of law to prove their academic skills to tenure and promotion committees. Their commitment and efforts are likely to fade as their careers become secure. Zenon Bankowski & Geoff Mungham, Images of Law 2–4 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).Google Scholar

51 The relationship of teaching materials to pedagogy is the subject of a forthcoming report in the ABF studies in legal education. The project, on teaching materials in legal education, is under the direction of Lester J. Mazor.Google Scholar

52 See Robert E. Mathews, A Problem Approach, in Weckstein, supra note 8, at 63; Lamborn, supra note 4; Aronson, supra note 49.Google Scholar

53 See F. Raymond Marks &. Darlene Cathcart, Discipline Within the Legal Profession: Is It Self-Regulation? 1974 U. Ill. L.F. 193; Eric H. Steele & Raymond T. Nimmer, Lawyers, Clients, and Professional Regulation, 1976 A.B.F. Res. J. 919; Philip Shuchman, Ethics and Legal Ethics: The Propriety of the Canons as a Group Moral Code, 37 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 244 (1968).Google Scholar

54 The history of courses on legal ethics at many schools has been one of accommodating pressures extrinsic to the law school. While law faculty have often felt a moral responsibility to the profession as well as to their students to include ethical instruction as part of the curriculum, they were also under pressure from state bar associations and accrediting agencies to offer this course. See Lamborn, supra note 4, 13–14. The unwillingness, however, of pattern-maker law schools, such as Harvard and Columbia, to have courses on ethics tended to consign the subject to an intellectual limbo. See note 3 supra; on the curricular influence generally of elite schools, see Brainerd Currie, The Materials of Law Study, reprinted in Packer & Ehrlich, supra note 26, at 267, and E. Gordon Gee & Donald W. Jackson, Following the Leader? The Unexamined Consensus in Law School Curricula (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, 1975). Practitioners have been heavily used as teachers of legal ethics. This was often taken as a way to deal with the reluctance of faculty to commit time to an academically unrewarded subject and still accommodate extrinsic pressures for the instruction. As teaching professional ethics appeared to require no particular expertise, other than being a credentialed member of the profession, courses frequently became identified with inexperienced teachers, practitioners' “war stories,” and moral preachments. As an example of the latter orientation, in 1962 the Association of American Law Schools published a reader to be used in these courses. Professional ethics was in the chapter entitled “The Religious and Ethical Dimension of the Lawyer's Vocation”—it included readings on “The Christian Vocation of the Lawyer,”“The Christian Lawyer as a Public Servant,” and “The Effect of Religious Principles on Lawyers' Ethical Problems.” Association of American Law Schools, Selected Readings on the Legal Profession ch. 10 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1962).Google Scholar

55 Nor should this study be taken to support a “pervasive” approach to teaching professional responsibility. The impact of learning norms is likely to have the same effect on that approach. One participant in a student conference on legal education reported: I remember last year Professor Curtis Berger walked in one day and said, “This is an ethical problem; how do you deal with it?” And half of the class was appalled at the waste of an entire class hour, and they told him so! So we had a make-up class as a result. Because we were talking about something that pertained to the lawyer's role in society, the class literally sat there and said, “You are wasting my time; I don't want to learn this. I want to learn concrete law.” And 1 think that Professor Berger is the only one in any of my classes who has even questioned the fact that there was another side to law besides black letters. Anthony J. Mohr & Kathryn J. Rodgers, Legal Education: Some Student Reflections, 25 J. Legal Educ. 403, 409 (1973).Google Scholar

56 Presently, there is a great deal of energy in legal education directed toward improving instruction in professional responsibility. A number of schools, including some in our survey, are currently revising their programs in this attempt. Whether these reforms will or can alter the impact of the latent curriculum remains for future appraisal.Google Scholar