Yearly Archives: 2017

Can Government Lawyers Be Heroes? 

May 11, 2017 Rebecca RoipheAdd a Comment

In 1973, in what has come to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Richard Nixon attempted to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, prompting his own Attorney General to resign. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the bar recoiled in shock as it acknowledged the number of lawyers complicit in illegal conduct. In this timely new article, Brad Wendel explores the obligations of government attorneys in an administration that has shown an unsettlingly similar disregard for legal limitations on its power.

It’s hard to keep up with the Trump administration’s distaste for dissent. Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates when she refused to enforce his travel bans on individuals with visas from seven predominantly Muslim countries. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer issued an ultimatum to state department civil servants, warning them to “get with the program,” and Senior White House Policy Adviser Steven Miller insisted that Trump’s national security decisions “will not be questioned.” Frustrated with the Washington Post’s coverage during the presidential campaign, Trump threatened to retaliate against owner Jeff Bezos by investigating Amazon for antitrust and tax violations. He responded to Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s unwillingness to dismiss a fraud suit against Trump University by insisting that the judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage. More recently, in a rage against the court that blocked his travel ban, President Trump tweeted an attack on the “so-called judge.” He vowed to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” and to throw flag burners in jail, with either ignorance or little regard for the fact that both have been determined to be illegal. Even Saturday Night Live spoofs prompt the President to engage in a barrage of social media insults.

Wendel easily convinces his readers that this administration has little tolerance for dissent, or what it might call disloyalty. In this climate, it is safe to assume that lawyers will be tested. Rather than wait for another Watergate scandal, Wendel offers a powerful guide for government lawyers. Building on his prior work, Wendel expresses little patience for arguments that a government lawyer owes her duties to the public or some abstract notion of the common good. He is disturbed by the arrogance or paternalism of a lawyer substituting her own opinion of what is in the public interest for that of her client. Most government lawyers do not serve the public interest writ large, but rather the particular agency in which they work. The people elect individuals to represent their interest, and it undermines both the democratic process and the rule of law when lawyers usurp that role.

The traditional obligations owed to the client do not, however, render the lawyer’s job ministerial. Drawing on the controversy over the now-famous torture memo, drafted by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, Wendel argues that lawyers have a fiduciary obligation to render competent, independent, and candid advice. While sympathetic to the context – The Office of Professional Responsibility’s (OPR) (an internal office devoted to ensuring that DOJ lawyers abide by their ethical obligations) report came shortly after 9/11 when the threat of terrorist activity seemed frighteningly real – Wendel concludes that the torture memo fell below these ethical standards. Wendel reminds attorneys who may be in a similar position in the Trump administration that, while OPR did not sanction Yoo or Bybee, it did conclude that it was a close question as to whether the lawyers intentionally or recklessly provided incompetent advice to their client. In an ironic twist, even Yoo believes that President Trump has an unhealthy attitude toward the power of the executive.

Amidst all of this, we have seen and are likely to continue to see an unprecedented number of leaks from within the administration. While it might be tempting to supply inside information to journalists, Wendel argues that government lawyers should think twice before following in Daniel Ellsberg’s shoes. Wendel discusses the ethics of whistleblowing for government lawyers and concludes that even the most well-intentioned act might be a betrayal of client confidences, a breach worthy of censure. The lawyer engages in misconduct if the disclosure does not fall under the exceptions in Model Rule 1.6 or 1.13, even if it is authorized by federal statutory provisions. Similarly, lawyers who were thinking of reviving Duncan Kennedy’s call for “sabotage” – the intentional rebellion against an evil client’s wrongful acts – are risking their license and betraying their professional obligations.¹

This does not leave government lawyers as defenseless pawns in President Trump’s game. Wendel explains that the government is designed with “competing power centers” to help preserve liberty, democratic accountability, and the rule of law. Lawyers can ethically work with their client to exercise this intra-branch check on presidential power, but they enjoy only a limited ability to do so. A lawyer can resign if her client persists in crime or fraud involving the lawyers’ services or if the client persists in a course of conduct which the lawyer finds repugnant. They have an obligation to the rule of law, which according to Wendel, is a culture of argument, or a “system for reasoned analysis through which norms can be contested and established.” It is this concept of a rule of law that limits government lawyers from caving to power.

With his usual grace and logic, Wendel presents a convincing account of a robust if limited role for lawyers in the Trump administration. They cannot run wild as moral arbiters of all that their bosses choose to do, but they play an important role in reigning in an administration whose respect for the rule of law is thin at best. Even more hopeful at a time in which our country seems so deeply divided, Wendel sets a course for professionals in preserving a rule of law that transcends partisan politics.

Wendel’s argument is most compelling when he discusses the role of lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General’s office, whose job it is to provide advice on the legality of executive action. I’m not as persuaded when he includes lawyers who staff more bureaucratic positions, as it is not as clear that the law governing lawyers should or does limit their role quite as much. Career civil servants can be the last line of defense and an important form of resistance when traditional checks on naked power fail. Shouldn’t professionals who staff government agencies, like all civil servants, draw on their experience and knowledge to protect the public from unsound policies?  Wendel implies that lawyers, who are essentially acting as civil servants, may have a greater obligation to give in to Spicer’s plea to “get with the program” than their nonlawyer counterparts, but there is something unsatisfying about a profession that bars its members from joining other bureaucrats in drawing on their experience and expertise to protect the public interest.

Legal Ethics After Liberalism

Apr 6, 2017 W. Bradley WendelAdd a Comment

David Luban and I just finished a paper celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. It recounts the history of the subfield of philosophical legal ethics, organized around two generations of scholarship.² The first generation located legal ethics within moral philosophy, seeking to connect the lawyer’s role with values such as autonomy, loyalty, and human dignity. First-generation scholars tended to agree with Arthur Applbaum that conventional and institutional considerations, such as social roles and rules of professional conduct regulating professions, did not relieve lawyers of the burden of articulating a justification, in ordinary moral terms, for their actions.³ The second generation, by contrast, regarded legal ethics as a branch of political philosophy, and the central problem not being individual moral agency, but the fact of a society characterized by a plurality of reasonable moral, religious, and political beliefs. A commentator challenged us to anticipate what themes the third generation of legal ethics scholarship would develop, and it occurred to us that we should add a fourth possibility, namely a radical position that is critical of the apparatus of positive law and liberal rights, perhaps as a kind of throwback to Critical Legal Studies.

Canadian legal theorist Allan Hutchinson’s recent book, Fighting Fair: Legal Ethics for an Adversarial Age, is just such a contribution to the debate. It is a fascinating combination of radical and old-school, with its reliance on virtue ethics and traditional conceptions of professionalism. Hutchinson rightly points out that the justification for the so-called standard conception of legal ethics, with its familiar tripartite structure of partisanship, neutrality, and non-accountability, is borrowed from liberal political and legal theory. (P. 43.) The problem with it, in a nutshell, is that the standard conception gives priority to the interests of clients over the public interest. (P. 53.) Of course, calling upon lawyers to pay more attention to the public interest has long been a staple of anguished reflections by lawyers and academics on the woeful state of the legal profession. Consider much-discussed books such as Mary Ann Glendon’s A Nation Under Lawyers and The Betrayed Profession by Sol Linowitz from the 1990’s, and more recent work such as Deborah Rhode’s The Trouble with Lawyers. What is distinctive about Hutchinson’s proposed reform of the standard conception is his analogy with the ethics of warfare. He anticipates that readers may blanch at that comparison. Doesn’t the legal profession need less adversarialness, not encouragement to think of litigation as war? Readers old enough to remember Sylvester Stallone action movies from the Reagan years will recall that an unethical style of practice was often referred to a “Rambo lawyering.” The so-called professionalism movement, which was active in the 1990’s, sought to restrain adversarial excesses and restore a spirit of cooperativeness and civility to litigation. Moreover, most lawyers are not litigators, and while it is true that transactional practice can be adversarial, in business practice there is at least the theoretical possibility of obtaining a good deal for all the parties. And what about lawyers who advise clients and bring them into compliance with the law? The warrior ethos central to Hutchinson’s book seems an inexact analogy for what many lawyers do in practice.

Hutchinson is fine with the adversary system. The distinction he really wants to hold onto within an adversarial arena is between soldiers—members of the armed forces of a state—and mercenaries. The contrast is one of motivation. Mercenaries are just in it for the money, while soldiers “are knowledgeable about war in both its operational and reflective dimensions, they respect the value of human life, and they are self-conscious of their moral responsibilities as soldiers.” (P. 61.) Modern lawyers, Hutchinson argues, are more like mercenaries than soldiers. Why? Because they are indifferent to their clients’ ends and committed only to a thin conception of the rule of law as procedural justice, unconcerned with substantive ends such as human rights. (P. 63.) By contrast warriors, after whom Hutchinson would prefer to model lawyers, “are as much concerned with honor and moral worth in how they go about their tasks as anything else.” (P. 65.) This contrast rings true for someone who has read extensively about the Bush Administration’s response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. The strongest opponents of the use of torture by the CIA and the uniformed services were military officers and lawyers.⁴ The warrior ethos proved to be one of the few ethical visions capable of resisting the relentless pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other high-level political officials who wanted to take off the gloves when dealing with suspected terrorists.

The contrast between mercenaries and warriors suggests some openness on Hutchinson’s part to a return to virtue ethics. What distinguishes virtue ethics from more familiar consequentialist and deontological is the emphasis within the former on the dispositions of the agent to act, think, or feel in particular ways. A mercenary and a warrior both fight, kill, and risk death in combat, so the action in either case is the same; the difference is that a warrior goes into battle for the right reasons. Military ethicists have made serious attempts to grapple with emerging technologies such as remotely-piloted aircraft and unarmed aerial vehicles by using the techniques of virtue ethics. For example, a recent book by a U.S. Air Force colonel and F-16 pilot argues that fighter pilots engage in combat with “heart,” while stateside drone operators occupy a morally ambiguous position.⁵ The warrior ethos emphasizes the equality of combatants, as manifested in their mutual exposure to the danger of violent death. Of course, mercenaries also put themselves at risk—perhaps even greater risk if they serve in relatively less cohesive and well-trained units than regular soldiers—so that is not the distinction Hutchinson needs to ground his moral disapproval of lawyers as mercenaries. Hutchinson does follow Col. Riza in thinking that something like equality of combatants is a distinguishing feature of the warrior ethos, although he puts it more in terms of fighting fairly and refraining from humiliation. (Pp. 66, 91, 102.) The influence of virtue ethics comes through more clearly in Hutchinson’s repeated reference to fighting with honor and respect for one’s enemies, which is an addition to the body of just war theory from which he draws much of his argument. Standard jus in bello analysis looks at proportionality and the protection of civilians, but Hutchinson’s concern is also with whether soldiers act with virtues such as self-control, courage, and persistence. (P. 92.)

Hutchinson is a severe critic of what he calls traditionalists about legal ethics (p. 37), but ironically his position is, if anything, even more deeply rooted in the tradition of professionalism. Sociologists from Émile Durkheim in the Nineteenth Century to Talcott Parsons in the Twentieth have maintained that lawyers are intermediaries between citizens and the state, whose professional judgment can be exercised to meld disputatious individuals and groups into a common social order. Like Rousseau, who distinguished between private interests and the general will, lawyers understood their role as pursuing the private interests of clients within the constraints of the public good. Or, to use the term associated with the civic republican tradition, lawyers are in a better position than their clients, or for that matter official legal institutions like legislatures and courts, to exercise civic virtue – that is, an impartiality among private interests, with due concern for the public good or general welfare of society.⁶ In the Twentieth Century this ideal was expressed in Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound’s definition of a profession as a group “pursuing a learned art as a common calling in the spirit of public service.”⁷ While neo-classical economists understood society as nothing more than an arena of competition for atomistic individuals pursuing their own interests, constrained only by the deterrent effect of sanctions for unlawful conduct, lawyers who subscribed to this ideal of professionalism sought to discern, internalize, and act on the general moral norms of their society.

The ideal of professions as custodians of the public interest was regarded with increasing skepticism throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, and is now all but a dead letter. As Rebecca Roiphe shows in a recent brilliant synthesis, intellectual pressure on the traditional professional ideal came from two directions: public-choice theory, which understood laws as nothing more than something offered for sale on a market, in exchange for votes or financial support by organized interest groups, and the moral pluralism associated with Isaiah Berlin and the later Rawls, which emphasized the existence of multiple, incompatible reasonable conceptions of the public interest.⁸ After the collapse of the traditional professional ideal, legal ethics scholars sought to reconstruct the discipline as described above – in the first generation, as responsive to ordinary moral considerations such as dignity and autonomy, and in the second generation, as responsive to political ends such as procedural justice and the rule of law. Neither of these responses appeals much to Hutchinson. He finds the second generation barren and technocratic, and has surprisingly little to say about the first generation. (Canonical scholars like Luban, Postema, and Wasserstrom are not cited at all.) There is tension in Hutchinson’s book between radicalism and traditionalism, but in the end what wins out is a kind of nostalgia for a lost era of chivalrous combat between knights-errant, combined with an almost eschatological vision of “a future situation in which war will no longer be possible between the parties.” (P. 113.)

I’m all in favor of awaiting the coming of the peaceable kingdom, but in the present circumstances of comprehensive and pervasive disagreement about matters of public policy, I’ll stick with political liberalism and the rule of law as the starting points for legal ethics. However, I am more sympathetic than many within legal ethics to the revival of virtue ethics. I’m not sure the warrior archetype is the right analogy for what most lawyers do, most of the time, in practice. But I do think Hutchinson is right to focus attention on the idea of acting for the right reasons. I also worry quite a bit about the thinness of political liberalism as a basis for social solidarity. Atomistic individualism and rights-talk can lead to political polarization and paralysis of democratic institutions, and the result may be that professions become increasingly important as conservators of public values. Fairness is a value that is relatively less important in American political culture as compared with other English settler nations such as New Zealand.⁹ Hutchinson’s call to the legal profession to reorient its ethical norms around the idea of fighting fair is one possible response to the dysfunction of American political culture.

The Role of “Good Prosecutors” in Advancing Access to Criminal Justice

Feb 20, 2017 Susan FortneyAdd a Comment

Jurisdictions around the world have adopted “access to justice” as an objective for regulation of the legal profession. Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of access to justice, there is no consensus on its meaning. Often commentators and advocates use the term to refer access to civil legal services for low income clients. In this article, Professor Bruce A. Green persuasively explains why such a connotation is entirely too narrow. He challenges readers to consider the meaning of “justice,” asking provocatively, “what happened to criminal justice?” One reason that I recommend reading this article is that it illuminates the pivotal role that prosecutors play in the pursuit of criminal justice and identifies specific steps that prosecutors should take to avert individual injustices, as well as systematic injustices.

To answer the question, “where are the prosecutors?” Professor Green first considers whether “access to justice” has been misappropriated by the civil pro bono movement. As noted by Professor Green, one justification advanced for focusing on civil justice is that indigent defendants who face incarceration are entitled to legal counsel.  He explains that this rationale overlooks various limitations in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963) and its progeny. Most notably, he clarifies that not all criminal defendants receive a qualified lawyer and that the Constitutional remedy for substandard representation is weak. To recognize the fact that there continues to be serious access to justice barriers faced by criminal defendants, Professor Green suggests that the bench and bar use their words carefully by not equating access to justice with access to civil justice. Rather he reminds us that no one should be “misled to believe that we have gone as far as necessary to secure criminal justice in this country.”

Using that exhortation as a jumping off point, Professor Green analyzes what it means for prosecutors to discharge their duties as ministers of justice and the organized bar’s role in influencing prosecutor conduct. As explained, the organized bar has largely focused these efforts on the minimal legal and ethical standards applicable to prosecutors and on prosecutors who fail to meet them. Although ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 3.8 is entitled “Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor” and Comment (1) to Rule 3.8 states that a prosecutor has “the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate,” the rule itself sets forth the minimum standards for a prosecutor to avoid professional discipline, such as the requirement for disclosure of information and evidence that is favorable to the defense. Beyond these minimum standards, Professor Green suggests a more demanding concept of a “good prosecutor,” urging the organized bar to spearhead serious examination of prosecutors’ justice-seeking role. Beyond abstract appeals, he identifies concrete contexts in which the bar can advance a more expansive role and recognize good prosecutors. He urges the organized bar to take the lead in tackling both individual injustices, as well as systematic injustices.

To illustrate how prosecutors should do more than the “minimum” to avert individual injustices, Professor Green uses the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, an exoneree who sat on death row for over 30 years, until eventually the U.S. Supreme Court acted. Although prosecutors in that case may not have violated minimum standards, Professor Green asserts that their duties as good prosecutors “presupposed that they take reasonable steps to avoid convicting innocent people.” In addition to describing specific steps that a “good prosecutor” should have taken, he suggests that the most important change may be prosecutors embracing the role as a minister of justice. He concludes by charging the bar to rethink its approach to criminal injustices. “When criminal injustices occur, the bar should ask–and try to answer—not only whether prosecutors caused the injustice, but whether good prosecutors could have prevented it.”

Prosecutors who serve as ministers of justice can play as important role as defense lawyers in preventing the conviction and incarceration of innocent persons. This is a perspective that the late Professor Monroe Freedman regularly shared with law students and new lawyers committed to advancing criminal justice. Professor Freedman encouraged them to seriously consider pursuing careers as prosecutors – as “good prosecutors.” Admittedly, Professor Freedman, like Professor Green, fully appreciated that the culture of prosecutors’ offices may make it difficult for prosecutors to “do justice” because of the incentives and disincentives. For example, does a prosecutor’s professional advancement largely turn on the number of convictions obtained. Good prosecutors should not be resigned to such organizational influences, but should lead efforts to shape cultures and incentives “to promote fair process, proportional punishment, and equal justice.”

In another article, Professor Green suggests that “doing justice” might mean “overcoming one’s own self-interest or ennui.”¹⁰ As stated:

In the face of contrary pressures and expectations, both external and internal, it may take a certain amount of inner strength (or strength of character) for an individual prosecutor to decide not to bring criminal charges or to dismiss criminal charges, to comply with procedural norms that make it more difficult to secure convictions, to confess error, or to seek to overturn a conviction that was unfairly procured. Id.

Professor Green, with Professor Ellen Yaroshefsky, examined the role of external and internal factors in an empirical study involving state prosecutors in seven offices in different parts of the U.S.¹¹ In studying how the prosecutors handled pretrial disclosure, they learned that the principal influences on prosecutors’ decision making are likely “organizational factors.” Id. at 270. Based on their study findings they conclude that the “most significant factor influencing prosecutors’ decisions are office policy, informal understandings, culture and internal regulatory and supervisory practices.” Id. at 289. As suggested by the study findings, any serious examination of prosecutorial conduct must consider the dominant role that organizational influences play.

In responding to Professor’s Green’s question (Where are the Prosecutors?) and his call for action, the hope is that concerned persons will do more than revise professional conduct rules related to prosecutor conduct. Rather than being satisfied with rule changes that may address the conduct of individual prosecutors, the organized bar and prosecutors themselves should seriously examine and change ethical infrastructures and other organizational influences that shape prosecutors’ conduct and affect access to justice for criminal defendants.

‘Benchmarking’ Ethical Identity of Law Students and How it is (or is not) Impacted by Law School

Jan 19, 2017 Francesca BartlettAdd a Comment

Much has been written about the ‘ethical identity’ of law students with what Elizabeth Chambliss describes as a dominant ‘corruption narrative’ informing philosophical and empirical accounts.¹² In another myth-busting study from Richard Moorhead and others, The Ethical Identity of Law Students, the diminishment thesis is tested, somewhat supported and problematized.

Blame is often leveled at an ever more commercialized profession and the (poor) signals it sends to law students about role morality. Moorhead’s research suggests that pre-conceptions of differing legal practice might attract differently ethically inclined students. . What these students then learn at law school is also subject to what Wald and Pearce describe as an ’industry’ of criticism.¹³ Scholarship across the common law world points to the negative effect of a neo-liberal turn of law schools; in Australia, Margaret Thornton has long argued that we produce ‘narrow technocrats.’¹⁴ Elizabeth Mertz describes a language of indoctrination at law school which favours professional ‘hubris’ over social justice and moral reasoning.¹⁵ While not all legal education has been implicated in ethical diminishment—notably clinical education—smaller-scale studies have produced little evidence of positive impact. Nevertheless, Chambliss argues that our student days and professional lives may be subject to many instances of ‘ethical learning’ and ‘ethical fading’. The difficulty then for any researcher trying to measure this influence is to understand the context and the subject.

In their excellently designed large group study of (1,010) law students in the US, England and Wales, the authors try to test the veracity of such theories. The study first takes up the challenge to set some methodologically rigorous benchmarks as to the ethical identity of their participating law students as they begin and end their studies. They assess whether ethical learning or ethical fading occurs, and whether certain types of ethical education have more or less of an effect. Finally, they test the self-selection thesis in so far as they compare the ethical identities of those who intend to practice law and those who don’t; and compare those who intend to practice business law with those who want to work in other areas.

The authors use a range of established psychological tools to measure a series of ethical indicators: values held, ‘ethical sensitivity, ethical implementation, moral motivation and identity formation.’ (P. 238.) The values of students in the US and England and Wales were found to be ‘broadly similar’ where they valued ‘self-transcendence and openness to change over self-enhancement and conservation.’ (P. 246.) While the paper does not provide any general population benchmark, these seem neutral results—their law students as a bunch don’t appear to be intrinsically bad people. And, for England and Wales, the study indicates that legal education enhances ethical identity as moral improvement was found between students early in their undergraduate studies and those in postgraduate vocational training. (P. 246-7.) However, the picture over time was quite different for US law students. Alarmingly for US educators, their students appear to diminish in moral identity and attentiveness as they progress through their studies.

Their second set of measures considered professional identification: ‘are law students identifying as professionals, as lawyers and what is the nature of that identification?’ (P. 239.) While sociological studies assume the adoption of professional norms as generally ‘pro-social’, the authors cast an appropriately skeptical eye on their results ‘because the relationships between professional identification and ethicality are complex, we do not use professional identity as a proxy for ethical improvement or degradation.’ (P. 240.) Indeed, the results of the study indicate that development of professional identification is variable and complex. No real pattern emerged for English and Welsh students. However, ‘among US students, identification as a professional or a lawyer [early in their studies] is generally replaced by an affective commitment to being a lawyer [by the end of their studies].’ (P. 247.) They conclude of this result:

Given the tensions between the profession’s claim of virtue (value of service to public and code of conduct) and a perceived risk of diminished ethicality (acceptance of otherwise questionable behavior) consonant with role morality might explain stronger affective commitment by lower identification. More simply, it might reflect a growing realization amongst US law students that being a lawyer is more of a ‘job’ and less of a profession. (P. 248.)

Thus they say that the combined results for US students are ‘consistent with the diminished ethicality thesis.’ (P. 248.) The US, like many other countries, mandates professional ethics education. England and Wales do not. The Moorhead study suggests that the presence of ethics courses have little impact upon, or may even exacerbate, ethical fading. But there’s a twist: the study also found that there was a ‘statistically significant relationship between ethics training and values or professional identification.’ (P. 251.) It was unclear to me how these two results correlate exactly, and more discussion of ethics training offered in compared courses would have assisted here. Still, the results encouragingly show that a well delivered clinical or ethics course may be an important site for student ethical learning.

The study also considered a range of variables such as gender and career intentions, producing interesting, if unsurprising, results. For instance, those wanting to do business focused practice had ‘a values profile consistent with weaker ethical propensity’, a ‘lower level of moral attentiveness’ and were more inclined to self-enhancement than those intending to work for government or individuals. (P. 249-50.) The authors contend:

Given that different career intentions are associated with different kinds of ethical identity; our results suggest that the pull of the legal profession may have more of an effect on ethical identity than any socialising effects from the push of legal education. (P. 256.)

What direction the profession ‘pulls’ law students in development of their ethical identity – specifically, how law firms ‘signal their own ethical identities’ (P. 258) —is an issue we must then expressly address with our students. Finally, there’s the strong impact of gender. By all their many indicators ‘female respondents’ showed ‘a greater disposition to behave ethically.’ (P. 250.) The authors conclude that:

… our results suggest that the strongest influences on ethical identity are external to or only peripherally related to legal education. The ethical identity of law students as a body is heavily influenced by the innate characteristics of the students. (P. 256-7.)

These results could inspire us to think more about the impact and potential of the student body we are educating, and what they bring to the ethical conversation.