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Abstract

Every decision in legal practice contains an ethics component. Legal education must, therefore, prepare prospective lawyers to recognize and resolve these ethical issues in a principled manner. Because law students who participate in live-client clinical programs become both observers and direct actors in the ethics of legal decisions, the clinical experience provides an intensely motivating and uniquely concrete opportunity to teach and learn legal ethics. Enhancing student perception and understanding of legal ethics represents a nearly universal goal of clinical teachers. The clinician's emphasis, the student's pre-existing ethics consciousness, and the immersion in the immediacy of live lawyering prompt students to examine the ethics component of their own legal decisions and those of the practicing attorneys around them and to raise these queries with their clinical teachers. When the clinical experience involves externship field placements-those in which the clinical teacher is neither a member of the legal office in which the student's ethical query arises nor otherwise responsible for case supervision-what is the appropriate role for the clinical teacher in facilitating resolution of the ethics component of a legal decision? Suppose, for example, that in a criminal practice clinic, a student externing with a local prosecutor's office becomes privy to exculpatory information that the supervising prosecutor has declined to provide the defense. When the student questions the prosecutor's decision to withhold exculpatory information from the defense, what responses are available to the clinical teacher?

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

3

Issue

2

First Page

259

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