Law School Innovation

Taking an Oath to Serve the Greater Good

The New York Times has a fascinating story by Leslie Wayne identifying a possible new trend among business students--to take oaths to serve the greater good, especially during their careers to come. 

Should law students take similar oaths? Lawyers, after all, were involved with Enron, Madoff, and, most infamously, torture.

Lawyers, of course, are already bound by professional ethics, and serve, among other things as, officers of the court. Yet, a promise to "serve the greater good" seems to state an ambition more directly perhaps than our lawyerly professional canons (though perhaps those better versed in these might enlighten me on this subject int he comments).

There is yet another issue: whether it is important that professionals see themselves as serving the "greater good." The famous Adam Smith passage saw a greater good arising out of the self-interested behavior of individuals. But perhaps even greater good might arise from more directly socially directed behavior, such as that arising out of a sense of professionalism.

Here's an excerpt from the NYT story:

When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.

Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.

What happened to making money?

That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.

“We want to stand up and recite something out loud with our class,” said Teal Carlock, who is graduating from Harvard and has accepted a job at Genentech. “Fingers are now pointed at M.B.A.’s and we, as a class, have a real opportunity to come together and set a standard as business leaders.”

At Columbia Business School, all students must pledge to an honor code: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The code has been in place for about three years and came about after discussions between students and faculty.

In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate.

Anupam Chander

Free Law Review Article Submission System: LexOpus

I post details from an email I received from John Doyle at Washington and Lee:

 

LexOpus (http://lexopus.wlu.edu) is a recently launched service at Washington and Lee Law School offering free online submissions to law journals. The service has two facets:

1) An author can make an article available to all interested law journals, inviting journals to make offers. Journals are able to limit by subject matter the articles that they see as open to offers.

2) An author can make offers to law journals in an author-specified journal list, LexOpus making on behalf of the author a short-term exclusive offer to each law journal in sequence. For non-peer-reviewed journals 'short term' is one week.  Author offers continue past each journal's exclusive period, on a non-exclusive basis, until rejected by the journal or withdrawn by the author, but any journal with an exclusive period always has acceptance priority.

An author can make a work 'open to offers' as well as submit to specific journals, or can do one or the other. As the system does permit uploading of revisions authors might make working papers open to offers and then, if no acceptable offers have been received, when the finished work is available submit that version to specific law journals.

Works can be suppressed from public view if the author so desires.

Anupam Chander

Fashion and Court

Apparently, the Seventh Circuit conference tackled the unusual issue of how lawyers dress.  The consensus:  Too sexy and too silly.  Interestingly, they blame the law schools, in part, for this failure.

Should we be teaching students how to dress?  I've tried, with mixed success.

-- Mark Osler

Rankings and Drinking

Over at Paul Caron's blog, I noticed his analysis of the Law School Party Rankings (in which Arizona State is #1, somehow edging out Tulane).   Tulane's Alan Childress, in turn, ignores this anomoly and makes a fascinating observation:  Sloppy as this ranking may have been, isn't there some validity in polling the consumers of our product in creating a ranking of schools?  Certainly, I wish the questions in such a survey weren't about beer availability (especially since I work at Baylor), but there is the grain of an excellent idea there-- to measure consumer satisfaction in creating rankings.  To be fair, I think it would be best to measure that satisfaction both among current students and alums, since we do not realize the full value of our education until we are using it in the market.

As Childress points out, the U.S. News method of polling deans and hiring chairs at the law schools which are being ranked is too often like letting the Pepsi executives rank Coke-- there is little chance of objectivity there.

It is a sad commentary to say that simply considering the satisfaction of our customers would be innovative, but I think that at too many schools that would be a fair characterization.

-- Mark Osler

Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?

Thanks to this post by Jonathan Alder at Volokh, I see from this article that Case Western Reserve University will soon have students in certain classes getting their their textbooks via the Amazon Kindles.   This Wall Street Journal report explains that Amazon "on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers."  Here's more:

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

The new device will also feature a more fully functional Web browser, he said.  The Kindle's current model, which debuted in February, includes a Web browser that is classified as "experimental."  Five other universities are involved in the Kindle project, according to people briefed on the matter. They are Pace, Princeton, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, and Arizona State.

Here at Law School Innovation, we have been talking about the Kindle and other e-readers in the law school classroom for nearly two years already (see 2007 posts here and here and here).  From the get-go, I have never doubt that e-books would eventually take over the law-school classroom.  Because of the extraordinary costs and inconveniences of traditional law school casebooks, the issue iin my view has always been, not whether e-books become common, but rather just when and exactly how they will enter the law school classroom.

Cross-posted at SL&P (by DAB)

The grimmest side of the legal economy

As a summer associate, I worked for Mark Levy at Mayer, Brown, and Platt in Chicago.  His suicide yesterday, reportedly just as people were being laid off by his current firm, Kilpatrick Stockton, comes as a shock.  Mark was a highly accomplished appellate attorney, and one I admired.

At a very personal level, this news makes clear to me how significantly the legal world outside of the academy has been rocked by the economy.  Yet, I don't get the sense that we are doing much different in the way we approach our students, at least on a macro level.  Personally, I see many more students come into my office who want to be prosecutors, one of the few jobs out there at the moment.  I tell them how to go about that type of job search, and wonder what the effects will be of that market now becoming flooded.  In doing so, I struggle to see how they will all find a place, at least in the next few years.

Empathy and compassion are too rarely traits we emphasize in our work, but perhaps that is one thing we might reconsider.

-- Mark Osler