Teaching Professionalism - Patrick E. Longan

• Citation: Vol. 60 No. 2
• Publication year: 2009

Teaching Professionalismby Patrick E. Longan^*

I. Introduction

In Work and Integrity, William Sullivan posits that all professional schools must train their students in "three apprenticeships."¹ The first apprenticeship is intellectual; it develops the knowledge base and the habits of the mind that the profession deems most important for the practitioner to possess.² The second equips the student with the set of skills that will be necessary for translating the intellectual training into effective action in practice.³ The third inculcates the student with the values and ideals of the profession.⁴ To master the complex tasks we expect of professionals, and to use that mastery in ways that are consistent with the profession's purpose, professional schools must integrate all three apprenticeships into their programs.⁵

The first two apprenticeships are familiar to legal educators. Regarding the first, aspiring attorneys at one time obtained their intellectual training by "reading law" under the supervision of practicing lawyers.⁶ That endeavor, however, long ago moved to the university setting. Doctrinal courses give students a fundamental grounding in various fields of law. These courses (especially in the first year) also help students develop the habits of mind that practitioners need. By reading cases and discussing them with the professor, students learn how to engage in common law reasoning and otherwise to "think like a lawyer."

The second apprenticeship also moved into the law school setting, although much more recently. Lawyering skills at one time were learned on the job, but eventually those in the profession began to urge the law schools to better prepare students for the things they would need to do in practice.⁷ The clinical legal education movement of the 1970s was one reaction to this entreaty. After the MacCrate Report⁸ of the early 1990s, law schools made even greater efforts to include skills training of various sorts in their curricula. The president of the Association of American Law Schools recently included increased skills training as one of the top ten major changes in legal education in the last twenty-five years.⁹ More clinics, improved legal writing courses, simulation courses, and a wider variety of externship opportunities are all intended to equip students with skills they can put into practice from their first day on the job.

This leaves the third apprenticeship. Traditionally, education about the values and ideals of the legal profession came, like intellectual and skills training once did, from actual apprenticeship.¹⁰ Older lawyers would help younger lawyers learn what it meant to be a professional through examples and one-on-one instruction.¹¹ The profession's willingness or ability to provide this third apprenticeship, however, has waned.¹² The economic pressures of law practice, especially the billable hour, have made mentoring activities too expensive to happen naturally as often as they once did.¹³ Lawyers who did not receive such mentoring in turn find it more difficult to provide it.¹⁴ Unsurprisingly, the profession has looked to the law schools to provide what it cannot or will not. To some extent, training in the values of the profession has been around since the post-Watergate era, when law schools were required to provide instruction on the rules of conduct. Many schools have expanded this training to include courses on the "Law of Lawyering." These courses include not only the rules of conduct but also other ways, such as civil and criminal liability, in which lawyers' professional responsibilities are enforced.

Yet this training has not been enough. The American Bar Association has twice in the recent past explicitly called for professionalism education in law schools.¹⁵ The ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools require instruction not just in the "rules and responsibilities" of lawyers but also in the "history, goals, structure, [and] values" of the profession.¹⁶ Law schools have responded to the call for professionalism education in a variety of ways. These responses have included, among other activities, orientations on professionalism, distinguished guest speakers, practitioner involvement in classes, mandatory mentoring, public service requirements, integration of skills courses and values training, and other programs.¹⁷ Legal education has responded, and is continuing to respond, to the need for law schools to introduce law students to the third apprenticeship.

Two recent comprehensive reports on legal education have again called for law schools to address questions of professionalism.¹⁸ In Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, a study conducted for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, William Sullivan and his co-authors, Judith Wegner, Anne Colby, Lloyd Bond, and Lee Shulman, write that "in a time when many raise questions about the legitimacy of the legal profession in both general and specific terms, professionalism needs to become more explicit and better diffused throughout legal [education]."¹⁹ Similarly, Professor Roy Stuckey of the University ofSouth Carolina writes in his recent Best Practices for Legal Education that "legal educators should take leadership roles in making professionalism instruction a central part of law school instruction."²⁰ Now more than ever, law schools need to consider how they can fulfill this need to provide more and better instruction about professionalism.

This Article is about one law school's efforts to teach professionalism. In the spring semester of 2004, the Walter F. George School of Law of Mercer University (Mercer) began to require all of its first-year students to take a three-credit, graded course on the Legal Profession in addition to the third-year Law of Lawyering course.²¹ It is important at the outset to note that the course is less about what lawyers should do and more about who they should become as professionals.²² In other words, the course is about the formation of professional identity. The course seeks to equip students with the information they need to choose what kind of lawyer they will become and inspire them to make choices that will enable them best to serve their clients, fulfill their public responsibilities, and find deep meaning in their work.²³ The notion of helping students form their professional identities has received much deserved attention in recent years, and our course is just one of the steps that law schools have tried.²⁴

In the past five years, we have experimented with a variety of techniques and covered a variety of subject matter in an attempt to fulfill the need for students to be introduced to their professional responsibilities at an early stage in their legal educations. This Article will describe the course in its present form and discuss our experiences with it. The first part of the Article covers the classroom component. The second part concerns several elements of the course that take place outside the traditional classroom and also briefly discusses assessment.

William Sullivan's metaphor of the three apprenticeships is a powerful device for thinking about professional education. As the third apprenticeship for law students joins the first two already established in the law school setting, law teachers need to learn from each other about effective ways to provide it. Mercer's experiences with the Legal Profession course may be instructive for other schools that are considering how to ensure that law students receive the exposure they need to what professionalism means for lawyers.

II. The Legal Profession Course: Classroom Lessons

The Legal Profession course is in the required first-year curriculum because we believe it is essential for students to acquire some understanding of professionalism at the outset of their legal education.²⁵ The course covers four lessons in a traditional classroom format, each of which is described in detail below. First, students learn what professionalism means for lawyers and why it is important. This training gives the students a vocabulary and a structure for discussing and analyzing issues of professionalism as they arise in later courses, summer jobs, and their first places of employment after law school. Second, they learn about the pressures, economic and otherwise, that might lead lawyers to engage in unprofessional conduct. This knowledge girds the students to meet the challenges that await them. Third, students learn how the expectations of professionalism are promoted and enforced. This instruction prepares them to become responsible members of a self-regulating profession, and it alerts them to gaps in the profession's ability to enforce professionalism. Finally, students begin to understand the connection between professionalism and their own personal senses of fulfillment as lawyers. As they enter a profession that has too many unhappy members, the students need to know that there is a relationship between what the profession asks of them and the satisfaction they will derive as lawyers. These are explicit lessons, and they can and should be taught overtly.

A. Lesson One: What Professionalism Means and Why it Matters

At their orientations, most law students will be urged to conduct themselves with professionalism. They will have no idea what this means. Oddly, many of the speakers who deliver this message also will not be able to give a precise meaning of what they mean by professionalism. Their presentations, though well-intentioned, often have an "I know it when I see it" quality. Professionalism, as generally defined, means simply the set of qualities that are characteristic of a particular profession.²⁶ For lawyers, the word has an aspirational quality as well as a descriptive one. Lawyers and law students are exhorted to act with something called professionalism in the hope that certain qualities will remain, or become, characteristic of the legal profession. The word...