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Teaching Law Students to Do the Right Thing
The exquisite importance of ethics and civility cannot be overemphasized in our profession. This is what enables us to achieve justice for our clients and to do so more efficiently and more easily.
If you are the most talented trial lawyer anywhere but you have not embraced ethics and civility, you will never become a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.
Professor Kenneth Townsend of Wake Forest University believes this. He heads up the program for Leadership and Character at Wake For- est’s professional schools, including its School of Law, its School of Medicine, its School of Divinity, and its School of Engineering. Pro- fessor Townsend graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mis- sissippi, where he won a Rhodes Scholarship, leading to a Masters from Trinity College in Oxford. He returned to graduate school at Yale, where he earned both a law degree and a divinity degree.
Professor Townsend works to create good lawyers. He is not refer- ring to competent, skilled, effective advocates, but instead to ethical, good lawyers, those who live and lead with integrity. At the Wake Forest Program for Leadership and Character, law students and other graduate students learn to understand the relevance of virtues such as humility, courage, reliance, empathy, and wisdom, both in their life and in their work.
Professor Townsend’s abridged remarks:
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