Title: New Horizons in the Role of Law Schools in Teaching Legal Ethics
Abstract: Law schools in America are facing crises that are difficult and unprecedented. From 1870 to 1945, law schools instructed their students-who were mostly white men-in subjects that the students would need to be corporate lawyers and litigators. Revolution came to legal education in the 1950s and 1960s when blacks, women, and activists wanted to learn how to make law an instrument of change. Law schools changed slowly, but the changes accelerated after 1980 when international studies, legal ethics, and women's studies radically altered the scene of legal education in America. Those changes were created or at least greatly encouraged by foundation grants. The Ford Foundation gave substantial help and encouragement to programs in international law in America's law schools. Indeed, the impressive offerings in international studies that now characterize American legal education would in all probability not be there if the Ford Foundation had not given creative leadership. The surge of progress in the rights of women is likewise attributable to generous and creative grants by a wide variety of foundations and other entities. The same could be said for the emergence of the movement for clinical legal education. Until the W.M. Keck Foundation initiated programs in legal ethics, the field of professional responsibility was in a real sense the orphan of the curriculum. Legal Ethics became a required course in the late 1970s, a development caused in part by the fact that twenty-eight lawyers were disciplined or convicted for their parts in the Watergate scandal. However, the requirement of this course both helped and hindered the development of the status of legal ethics as a respected discipline. The establishment of the score of awards by the Keck Foundation created for the first time some outside initiative and enthusiasm to make legal ethics a much more vital and integral part of the curriculum of all law schools. A continuation and expansion of Keck grants will add important dimensions to the academic and professional content and orientation of America's law schools. Indeed, it might well bring about a moral rebirth of those ethical standards that the U.S. legal profession inherited from English jurists who created the common law.