Teaching Virtue in Legal Clinics: How Clinics Can Teach Morality, Goodness, Hope, Love, and Humanity

Go Back

Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Union Square 5&6

Floor: 4th Floor

Human rights theory demands that individuals be treated with dignity and respect. These demands arise from what many of us consider the basis of virtue. Exploring the foundational connection among moral virtues, respect, and dignity may lead clinicians to examine whether and how to incorporate universal virtues into our teaching. Hope is essential for justice, and just communities rest on foundations of love, truth, care, and service. In preparing students for law practice and public citizenship, clinics have a rich opportunity to impart and empower students' essential senses of virtue, goodness, morality, and ethical identities. These timeless ideas are implicit in academic discussions of legal ethics and systemic critiques, so naming and exploring them explicitly can deepen sustainable work for justice and democracy. Renewing a universal vocabulary of love, honesty, generosity, hospitality, courage, care, and justice can invigorate and encourage students' professional and vocational commitments as attorneys. These virtues can empower advocacy, instill resilience, and stave off cynicism over the course of a career while advancing progress toward beloved community in diverse contexts. The session aims for clinicians to consider whether and how to incorporate teaching virtues and morality in clinics as a foundation of professional formation and bases for social justice and democracy. Panelists will situate virtue in context as a feature of professional formation and legal ethics and consider how clinical teaching and practice can explore and deepen the role of virtue in lawyers’ work. The panel will invite discussion among the audience about the role of morality in legal ethics, the appropriate role of these conversations in clinic settings, and sound boundaries among teachers, students, and clients.