Teaching Professional Ethics

Unless the bar is uniformly imbued with that spirit of honesty and decency and unless it is inspired to insist upon the exercise of the highest ideals in the day-to-day practice of law, then no disciplinary system can be effective and no code of professional conduct will be anything more than a hypocritical farce. How can such an ethical renaissance take place? That, to be sure, is the question and to my mind there is but one possible answer. It must begin in the law schools of this country and spread from there — through continuing legal education programs and through recent graduates — across the land.

But to be successful, law schools must consciously undertake the one task that they have universally rejected: instilling normative values in their students.