THERE is no question about it. Ask any law student and you will get the same answer: one course, LAW 7071, Professional Responsibility, is the pesky requirement. It is a bee buzzing in our ears. Although the Law School has relatively few required courses, our ethics course is an unmovable rock.
I have got to admit that when I signed up for the course, I did so with more than a pinch of cynicism. I was wrong: After taking Professional Responsibility, I simply cannot imagine a curriculum which does not have a required class in ethics.
Given the scandals which regularly grace headlines, the need for an ethics course is perhaps more acute for practice in law, medicine or business. For example, the legal profession has a Code of Professional Responsibility detailing the standards of ethical conduct that all lawyers are expected to follow. Indeed, as Prof. Richard Balnave, one of the main professors of Professional Responsibility at the Law School, has pointed out, "Some of the rules of legal ethics are easy to understand because they mirror rules of ethics that apply throughout society, such as the general rule that it is wrong to lie or deceive. No special classes would be needed to understand these types of rules. However, there are other rules of legal ethics that are not readily understood because they arise from the special roles that lawyers are assigned in our adversary system of justice
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