Enriching the Legal Ethics Curriculum: From Requirement to Desire

The problem has become all too familiar: Acting at least in part from noble motives, the American Bar Association ( ABA ) requires all law students at ABA-accredited law schools to take a course in professional responsibility. Every accredited school offers a course or courses that enable students to fulfill this requirement. Under these circumstances, the professional responsibility course can easily assume the character of high school drivers\u27 education or health classes: It often becomes an obligatory exercise, in which students think they must woodenly learn the maxims of the ABA Code of Conduct or Rules of Professional Responsibility. Faced with this attitude from students, even the most dedicated, creative teacher sometimes falls into mechanistic pedagogy, teaching what the students apparently expect, in the shadow of the bureaucratic tone set by the ABA\u27s influence on the curriculum