Introduction to 'The Ethics Project in Legal Education'

A common starting point for all the chapters in this book - the third and final volume in the series of publications flowing from the Third International Legal Ethics Conference held in Australia in 2008 - is that law schools worldwide do have an important role to play in preparing law students for the ethical challenges of legal practice. This fundamental assumption has not always been widely shared, and some resistance to the proposition continues. In fact, law school ethics teachers in most, if not all, of the countries represented by the contributors to this volume continue to see themselves as a minority in law school education. Not only are legal ethics teachers still relatively few and far between, but many who have chosen - sometimes passionately - to work in this area and to develop a scholarship on the pedagogy of legal ethics continue to see their mission as one that needs to be advocated constantly within wider legal and academic communities. This is because legal education as a whole, even in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, has yet to accord legal ethics teaching the degree of importance that the contributors to this volume, among many others, have long taken for granted. However, the traditional ambiguity and sometimes indifference towards the legal ethics project in legal education has gradually been giving way to an acceptance of the importance of this area of learning. In comparison to ten or even five years ago, there is now a wider acceptance of the need to take seriously the challenge of teaching and learning ethical responsibility for legal professional practice.