Should Ethics Be Part of the Law School Rankings?

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JessicaTef of AL 9:41AM May 10, 2009

Why are professionalism and ethics important to legal education and to practicing lawyers?
To answer the above question I wish to share my understanding and interpretation of the terms professionalism and ethics.
The word professionalism first originated in a religious setting wherein a group of individuals “professed” to a standard of excellence different and apart from the general populace.* Today, the term typically includes several characteristics. They include:
Specialized skills
Community that is autonomous and self regulating
Duty to the public
When we examine these characteristics associated with professionalism we can discern that they necessitate both competence and character. As Albert Flores points out in Professional Ideals to be a professional means, in part, being committed to using professional skills and knowledge, in morally acceptable ways, for the benefit of society.”
Needless to say, there exist great differences of opinion as to what is beneficial to society or what will contribute to the “common good.” In addition, individuals differ on what is meant by the common good. Is it immediate family, the town in which we live, the company for which we work, the professional organization to which we belong, the planet as a whole?
If in fact we are in agreement that professionalism incorporates behaving in morally acceptable ways for the benefit of society, than we can not separate ethics from professionalism.
At its most fundamental level, ethics is about the decisions we make, the way we act toward one another and the impact we have on the world around us. The study of ethics takes us on an internal journey and asks that we make informed decisions on these actions based on knowing and balancing our highest values so that we "do the right thing."
One might posit that the Code of Professional Conduct dictates the ethical choices a lawyer must make. As many professionals know it is not that simple. Aside from the fact that lawyers have many responsibilities (member of the legal profession responsible for upholding the law, representative of clients, third party neutral and public citizen expected to seek improvement of the law. Aside from the increasingly complex ethical implications of the varying roles of the lawyer, this conundrum is amplified with the language of the Code itself. We have shalls, shall nots, mays, and shoulds that define the lawyers roles. While the code offers guidance and rules of reason “the rules do not, however, exhaust the moral and ethical considerations that should inform a lawyer, for no worthwhile human activity can be completely defined by legal rules.
*On Being a Professional, Morally Speaking
Article by Paul F. Camenisch

robbie glantz of CO 1:00PM March 18, 2009

If "ethics" were to be added to the US News Rankings consideration, then I hope one of the factors to take into consideration is the law school's administration's behavior. I think it is terrible that law schools play all sorts of games to move ahead or stay ahead in the U.S. News rankings just to deceive prospective students. I posted the following in response to a PrawfsBlawg' post about this point:
How about evaluating the schools by their behavior with respect to what they are willing to do to improve US News rankings? For example, is it ethical to hire numerous short term research assistants around graduation to ensure the employment "at graduation" count is high? To ensure the 9 months after graduation count is high, is it ethical to (1) send out a registered letter to graduates' last known mailing addresses that says something to the effect that "if we do not hear back from you by [x date], we will assume that you are employed and count you as employed for our employment stats" and (2) use that as the basis to affirmatively count those graduates as having obtained employment on the NALP form? I'm sure you are well aware of other ranking-manipulation tactics. I believe all of the deans at these law schools (as well as many of the professionals engaged in these activities) are lawyers. Do some of these actions violate any ethical obligations? See, e.g., Model Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 8.4 ("It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to . . . (c) engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation"). I would argue that many of these tactics are utilized with the intent to deceive prospective students and employers -- enroll or recruit at our great law school for the following reasons:
(1) we are ranked # _ ;
(2) our students are super smart because their LSAT/GPA # are __ (nevermind that those numbers will get diluted by a large wave of transfer 2Ls); and
(3) 98% of our students are employed at graduation and 99% of our graduates are employed 9 months after graduation, so students are practically guaranteed a job to help with their massive debt (nevermind the fact that 30% of those students were temporarily employed by our school to do minor research after graduation and we have no clue what 10% of them are really doing).

Anon of IA 11:06PM March 02, 2009

you are the stupidest person on the face of the planet

i hate you of AL 3:53PM February 26, 2009

Because there are only 2 ways to teach the basic course in ethics (required course or ethics "pervasively" throughout the curriculum), you'd likely be able only to highlight those schools w/ethics centers of some sort. (It's much the same issue as how to evaluate legal writing programs.) You could TRY to evaluate it as a specialty program, but I'm even more intrigued by the idea of rating ethics in filling out the rankings questionnaire. Is there a way to dock schools who get caught cheating? THAT might be interesting....

Nancy Rapoport of NV 3:33PM February 24, 2009

There's simply no way to measure "ethics" in law schools. It's required by the ABA already. Unless you're going to go through disciplinary actions in the 50 states and determine how many of them were committed by people from X or Y law school, it's just not going to work. at all. It'll become another artificial fudge category.

MTD of IL 6:44PM February 19, 2009