Page 66 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

WE MUST REMEMBER THAT INTELLIGENCE IS NOT ENOUGH.
INTELLIGENCE PLUS CHARACTER — THAT IS THE GOAL OF TRUE EDUCATION.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in legal education. Around the same time, we saw the publication of Yale Law School Dean Tony Kronman’s The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession. In this influential book, Kronman ar- gues that lawyers and law students in legal education have lost touch
of a commitment to the broader public.
In 2007, we saw the publication of The Carnegie Report, one of the most influential and incisive analyses of legal education over the past several decades. At about the same time, professionalism re- ports were being published by the ABA, focusing on not only legal education but also on the profession of lawyering. In 2014, the ABA adopted new standards which require that law students satisfy expe- riential learning requirements. All of this has taken place with an eye toward a more holistic formation of lawyers.
Just two years ago, new standards were passed by the ABA which require that law schools aid students in the development of a profes- sional identity. For the first time, law schools were tasked with pro- viding “substantial opportunities to students for the development of a professional identity” which includes “values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to the successful practice of law.”
These recent standards updates represent the latest effort by the ABA to respond to the findings of the Carnegie Report. The Carnegie Report authors identified three domains for apprenticeships of legal education. First is the knowledge-based domain, where we in legal education teach students to think like lawyers. According to the au- thors of the Carnegie Report, we transfer knowledge pretty well. The second domain is the practice domain, where we focus on legal skills so that law students can actually be prepared to practice law. The third domain, the ethics and professional domain (also referred to as the “purpose and professional identity” domain), is the one where the legal profession has performed terribly. This is something that was not touched upon at all in legal education.
This is a problem. It has led lawyers to emerge into practice with cramped identities. Ethics was no more than checking a box. Pro- fessional responsibility courses merely allowed you to punch a ticket and to move out into the legal world. That is not enough.
A character-based approach to leadership development and pro-
fessional identity formation is valuable. There are two starting
assumptions here. One is that lawyers are leaders. Lawyers are
expected to lead in a variety of domains but they rarely receive
formal law school training to do just that. The second starting assumption, based on ongoing ex- amples of moral failures, is that that there is an opportunity to train good, not just effective lawyers.
A quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. captures our orientation and sensibility in the Program for Leadership and Character: “Intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that’s the goal of true education.” That is what we try to accomplish in our work at Wake Forest.
There is some structure to the Wake Forest Program for Leadership and Character, which was adopted from the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham in the UK. The folks at the Jubilee Center have outlined these four categories of virtues: Intellectual virtues, moral virtues, civic virtues, and performance virtues. There are representative examples of these virtues in the context of legal education and legal practice.
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