"Ethical, ooh, Yeah Ethical is Yeah, What's Right Yeah" 1 : A Snapshot of First Year Law Students' Conception of Ethics

Abstract

This paper suggests a baseline conception of ethics of first year law students. It is grounded on the awareness that the call for greater ethical conduct within the legal profession is based on a particularly strong conception of ethics; namely ethics deals with the public accountability to the Good for the practical values and judgments an individual makes in their daily life. The research uncovered that law students did not share this conception of ethics. Students tended to either reduce the ethical to another field of human conduct, such as politics or law, or conceived it as the realm of subjective morality that involved no public accountability. This vacuity of ethics for first year law students presents an added challenge to the ethical legal education project in that before ethics can be taught, ethics must be made to mean something.