For more than fifteen years, Mercer Law School has pioneered a virtue ethics approach to professional identity formation within the legal profession by requiring all first-year students to take a course in professional identity that focuses on developing practical wisdom. With the American Bar Association considering an amendment to its accreditation requirements to require a course in professional identity formation at all law schools, the Mercer approach and the textbook written by the architects of the course could become a model for other law schools.

“We talk about why professional identity is important, how you develop a professional identity through habits and practice and by paying attention to exemplars. And then, what the challenges are to developing the kind of professional identity you want and how to overcome them,” said Daisy Hurst Floyd, University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation, who teaches the course with her Mercer Law School colleagues, Patrick Longan, William Augustus Bootle Chair in Professionalism and Ethics, and Timothy Floyd, Tommy Malone Distinguished Chair in Trial Advocacy and Director of Experiential Education. The course was conceived by Professor Longan in 2004 and continues to be led by him.

The course has evolved over the years from a series of large lectures to a more interactive format that includes small sections, written reflections, and visits from 10 to 15 lawyers who are moral exemplars.  The course is grounded in six “lawyer virtues” that emerged from Longan, Floyd and Floyd’s research.

“The first five lawyer virtues are:

• competence (excellence) in the craft of lawyering, which includes knowledge, skill, diligence, and judgment;
• fidelity to the client, including confidentiality, communication, and loyalty;
• fidelity to the law, which includes not assisting clients with crimes or frauds as well as compliance with the limits of proper advocacy;
• public spiritedness, including providing equal access to justice for all, representation of unpopular causes and clients, and self-regulation in the public interest; and
• civility, which includes courtesy, cooperation, and truthfulness,” explained Longan, Floyd and Floyd.

“The need to deploy the right amount of the virtues and the possibility of conflict among the virtues brings us to the need for a sixth virtue: the “master virtue,” practical wisdom.

Our model of the six virtues assumes that the lawyer will also possess important personal virtues and will integrate those virtues with the five distinctive lawyer virtues, all to be integrated by the master virtue of practical wisdom.”

The class includes around 130 students, divided into sections of 24 or 25. For the section meetings, the students are given a problem to discuss in groups of 2 to 4 before class. The sections are led by a faculty member, and the problems discussed increase in complexity over the course of the semester.

“We start off by putting [students] in the role of observers. We read about lawyers who have had ethical challenges, and we want them to identify what those challenges are, what virtues are being threatened, where the tensions are, and then comment on why they think things went the way they did,” Daisy Floyd said. “Then we move them into roles as members of the state bar leadership to help them understand what it means to be part of a self-regulating profession. Finally, they have four sessions where they engage in practical wisdom problems that build in complexity, where they have to come in and talk about what they would do if they were faced with these situations. We try to help them, during the discussion session, to unpack the issues, to identify which virtues are being threatened, to think about why they might not respond well and what would be the challenges or the obstacles.”

Mercer Law School draws on the principles and methods from the first-year professional identity course when second and third-year students participate in clinics and externships that give them opportunities to observe and implement practical wisdom in context.

“The first few years were tough as we tried to figure out how to get this material received well from our law students” Floyd said. “But for about 10 years now it has had the current structure and we keep getting better and better at it, I think.”

Floyd hopes that other schools can benefit from their work, and looks forward to continued collaboration toward a virtue ethics model as professional identity formation becomes more of a priority at law schools.