According to a recent Carnegie Foundation on Education report discussed within Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and A Road Map, the legal profession is in danger of becoming de-moralized as law schools fall short in encouraging students to develop ethical compasses.The authors of Best Practices, senior faculty from law schools nationwide including NYU, Rutgers, and Vanderbilt, cite the need for professional ethics training throughout the law school curriculum in addition to standard ethics courses. They argue that students would be better prepared to tackle the professional and personal challenges of being a lawyer if law schools had a more positive impact on the development of their value systems.
Publications like The National Jurist have recently explored the issue as well.
According to the Carnegie report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law:
In so far as law schools choose not to place ethical-social values within the inner circle of their highest esteem and most central preoccupation, and in so far as they fail to make systematic efforts to educate towards a central moral tradition of lawyering, legal education may inadvertently contribute to the demoralization of the legal profession and its loss of a moral compass, as many observers have charged (140).Regent Law’s integrated curriculum has trained students to practice law ethically and professionally since its inception - in advance of recent findings.
“Christian Foundations of Law,” Regent’s signature first-year curriculum course, is one such example. Students explore the biblical foundations of law and the divergent path of modern law. The course challenges students to measure their legal success in light of eternal principles of truth and justice. It also encourages them to wed intellectual analysis with the dictates of conscience, and to ultimately practice law with excellence and integrity.