Adam MacLeod writes for the Martin Center about an important role for law schools.
Law school faculties hold a sacred trust. We guard the outermost portals into the legal profession, a group that wields powers to shape society in profound and lasting ways.
Several years ago, the law faculty on which I serve decided to fulfill our trust by educating lawyers in the great tradition of the liberal arts—to think critically and live virtuously. Students who enroll in the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law begin their studies in our Foundations of Law course, which is designed to dispose them to form their intellects and characters while they learn the techniques of legal practice.
In the course, students consider matters both profound and useful. They examine the relationship between legal justice and natural justice, the difference between rights and privileges, the operation of formal logic in legal arguments, different approaches to interpretation and adjudication, and much more.
Along the way, students are sure to encounter at least one idea that they find disagreeable. They learn how to disagree (rather than merely take offense), which requires them to understand ideas and not simply to reject words that they find emotionally uncomfortable.
Our Foundations course, which all students take in their first semester, is unique among core law school courses. Yet that understates the neglect of virtue in legal education. Those who control the gates to legal practice think a lot about the knowledge, skills, and professional qualifications a person must attain before becoming a lawyer. But on the whole, they give little thought to what sort of person a lawyer should be.