ABSTRACT
The Carnegie Foundation’s 2007 report on legal education has triggered a re-examination of the purposes and methods of legal education around the world. It proposes reforms calculated to produce graduates who are better prepared for practice and more strongly committed to perform responsibly in practice. Its recommendations are intended to lead law schools to develop lawyers who have a confident and constructive sense of professional identity and purpose so they will pursue their careers with a deeper commitment to the highest possible values of the legal profession – higher values than are currently observed among practitioners. While the Carnegie Foundation’s recommendations are sound, the law schools’ efforts to develop a more ethical legal profession will be limited if there is not a concomitant effort on the part of the leaders of the profession and regulators to secure broader adherence to the profession’s ideals by those who are already licensed to practise. This is because one’s legal education and professional formation continue into one’s practice years, and they are impacted by the practising Bar during and after law school. The lessons taught in the law schools can be diluted by what law students and new lawyers observe in practice and how they see incidents of misconduct treated by the organized Bar and the more experienced lawyers with whom they come into contact. Therefore, building a more responsible legal profession requires a more focused commitment not only of law faculty, but of practising lawyers as well. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued a report2
on legal education in 2007 that has proved to be very influential.3 Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (the Carnegie Report) makes two overarching recommendations: (1) preparation for the practice of law should be understood to involve three distinct but related ‘apprenticeships’ (cognitive, practical and ethical-social);4 and (2) the three apprenticeships should be administered in an ‘integrated’ manner.5 To implement the integrated model of legal education, the Carnegie Report encourages law schools to provide students with more lawyering experiences under the supervision of the law schools. This may be through clinics, externships or simulations.6 One goal of this integrated approach
to legal education is to persuade law schools to introduce strategies that will develop lawyers who have a confident and constructive sense of professional identity and purpose so that they will pursue their careers with a deeper commitment to the highest possible values of the legal profession – higher values than are currently observed among many practitioners.7
