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Abstract

Moral philosophers have long debated whether morality can be taught. Their debate has interested legal academics because of the obvious links between morality and law. This interest in teaching morality was intensified by the Watergate scandal, which led to the mandatory teaching of professional responsibility. However, neither the lessons of moral philosophy nor the concerns about Watergate have led to classroom teaching that creates demonstrably more moral law students. Meanwhile, developmental psychologists, relying on the pioneering work of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, have investigated how individuals develop their capacity to reason morally. Their work has demonstrated that the capacity to reason morally develops in identifiable stages as the result of an interaction between an individual's cognitive structure and certain significant life experiences. Their findings have inspired educators to test strategies that replicate in the classroom the kinds of life experiences that promote moral development in real life. Although some clinicians and legal academics have begun to take note of the work of these educators, so far no one has tested these strategies systematically in a law class. This article, in summarizing six years of applied teaching research, reports on how a series of semester-long experientially taught legal ethics courses promoted moral reasoning. Part One briefly sketches Kohlberg's theory of moral development, on which I relied in measuring the improvement in moral reasoning which these courses elicited. Because Kohlberg's theory has engendered controversy, Part Two anticipates and responds to criticism of this theory in part by defending the theory and in part by explaining why its weaknesses do not undercut the validity of the teaching results I report. Part Three describes how the experiential professional responsibility courses were taught, and presents the data I have gathered to measure the impact of these courses on students' moral reasoning. Finally, Part Four traces the lessons that this research suggests about the conditions for fostering moral growth in law school and points to the many questions on this subject for which we do not yet have answers, and for which we need additional research.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

1

Issue

3

First Page

505

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