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Abstract

Ida Brown was eighty-six, increasingly confused and physically ill. Two doctors, including her treating physician, certified that she was incompetent. The social services department sought the appointment of a guardian for her, in order to sell her home in which she had lived for forty-seven years and put her in a nursing home. Ms. Brown told her student attorneys to tell the guardianship court she wanted to be left alone. One of the students thought the law clinic should consent to the appointment of a guardian. His supervisor disagreed, arguing that the clinic should develop an in-home care plan, but if Ms. Brown rejected it, assert her "leave me alone" argument in court. Tony was fifteen, learning-disabled and in trouble again. He refused to attend school, despite the fact that a juvenile court had ordered him to do so as a condition of probation on a theft conviction. He had a long juvenile "rap sheet" and was one step away from confinement. Tony refused to accept the private special education placement that the clinical supervisor wanted to offer to the court as an alternative to confinement. If he had to attend school, Tony wanted to enroll in his neighborhood school, which, in over seven years, had failed to teach him how to read most three-letter words. The student attorneys wanted to assert Tony's position, not the clinical supervisor's. In this article, we use case studies like Ms. Brown's and Tony's to consider how clinical teachers and students make ethical decisions and how we teach ethics. By "ethics," we mean positive law - rules, statutes and common law principles - as well as common moral principles. The Model Rules and Model Code of Professional Responsibility are important sources of ethics law. We also use other bodies of substantive law, however, we emphasize that legal ethics include moral principles, and that lawyers make ethical decisions with moral reasoning.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

3

Issue

1

First Page

109

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