Legal Ethics Seminar

3 units

Enrollment limit: 16. Drop deadline: 5:00 p.m. the day after the first class meeting. [This course is a part of the ethics curriculum. It is not considered a "survey" ethics course, so students may take this course and other ethics courses. There are no prerequisites for this course. JD students may not satisfy both the seminar and ethics graduation requirements by taking this course; students may satisfy one or the other.] In this seminar, each student writes a 5000-word research paper on a topic related to legal ethics. The seminar meets five times at the beginning of the semester to examine basic concepts in legal ethics (such as the fiduciary nature of the lawyer-client relationship, the confidentiality obligation and its exceptions and conflicts of interest) and meets five times at the end of the semester when students make presentations about their research, ask questions about others' research, and respond to those questions. In preparation for writing the final paper, each student is required to hand in several interim written assignments: a list of three possible topics that they would like to pursue; a 1-sentence statement of the paper's thesis; a 1-page sentence outline of the proposed paper; and lists of sources the student plans to use. Students may also be asked to hand in revised versions of these interim assignments. (This seminar is not graded anonymously because the professor works with students on their writing projects throughout the semester.) Method of evaluation: research paper and in-class presentation. 3 units.