Teaching Lawyers Ethics

An article in today's New York Times discusses a book called The Myth of Moral Justice. Written by a disenchanted big-firm attorney, it attacks the way law schools educate would-be lawyers when it comes to ethics and morality. To be blunt, they don't. "Ethics" classes (like mine at WVU) consist mostly of learning the Rules of Professional Conduct. Useful as those are (dealing with things like attorney-client relationships, duty to the court, etc.), they are largely divorced from broader questions of morality. I actually took a class in law school called "Moral Philosophy for Lawyers" (the final product of which you can access here) that tried to address those issues. Should law schools do more? That's not where I'd reform legal education, but it wouldn't hurt.