professionalism
Professionalism Program:
Preparation for Practice in Heart and Mind
[email protected]
By Sarah Shalf
Emory University
S
tudents often enter law school with a picture of what
law school is like based on popular culture. There is
the movie The Paper Chase and Scott Turow’s book
One L (both about the first year at Harvard Law School),
where backstabbing students undermine each other in
study groups and hide library books; and TV shows like
Law & Order, where attorneys ask questions they know are
unfairly prejudicial, only to follow the question (and inevitable
objection) with a casual “withdrawn.” From that perspective,
practicing law seems to be about “gaming” the system and
taking advantage of weakness, not about the rule of law and
professionalism.
The Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism
developed the Orientation to Professionalism program in
1993 with the State Bar and all of the Georgia law schools
to instill a culture of professionalism in law students from
the start, countering this cynical view of the profession.
Although each law school’s programs are somewhat unique,
the essential structure is the same: as part of the students’
orientation program, practicing attorneys and/or judges meet
with entering students in small groups to discuss hypothetical
ethical problems that might arise in law school and actual
practice.
These students have not even begun law school classes,
much less a course in legal ethics. The focus, then, is not
to teach the Rules of Professional Conduct, but to introduce
students to the difficult decisions that confront us, and
to demonstrate, through the participation of the Bar, that
wrestling with these decisions is not limited to lofty, ivory-
tower discussions, but is genuinely what lawyers and judges
expect of their colleagues and of the profession.
At Emory, the program was expanded to include additional
discussion sessions beyond the August session, and to
include both law faculty and practitioners. With those features,
the program won the ABA’s Gambrell Professionalism Award
in 1999, and has continued to develop and expand. In its
current form, the program includes all entering students,
including LLM and transfer students, thereby enabling
everyone in the community to benefit from a common
experience, and develop a common culture of respect,
integrity, excellence and service. The program has two
sessions for students in their first year, and upper-class
students return to a discussion of professionalism as part of
the Legal Profession course, often with members of the Bar
participating. Additionally, we have begun to expand the firstyear program with the goal of including a current or former
judge or justice, in addition to an attorney, in every group.
Whereas law students are encouraged and eager to “think
like a lawyer,” and that often involves dispassionate analysis
of both sides of an argument, the Professionalism Program
reminds them that the Rules are rooted in a deeper moral
and professional code, and must be understood and
interpreted in that context. Only by cultivating a culture of
professionalism from the very beginning, and reiterating it
throughout the law