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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE A. STRAND ONE: BECOMING A COMPETENT AND INVESTED MEMBER B. STRAND TWO: COMMUNITIES AS STEWARDS OF THEIR DOMAINS C. CRITICISMS OF COMMUNITIES [...], This Article uses Community of Practice ("CoP") frameworks and insights to examine legal ethics, a vital but challenging part of legal education and practice. CoP is a template to explain how the knowledge we learn is inseparable from the social situations in which it is "practiced" and how the processes through which we learn can be understood as a trajectory toward becoming competent knowers within a community. Increasingly, CoP also captures how communities might be initiated and sustained to advance that practice or expert domain. CoP theory illuminates the difficult conflicts both in teaching and in learning legal ethics, conflicts driven by the clash between "ethics-as-rules" and "ethics-as-judgment. " Using CoP ideas, this Article argues that legal ethics suffers from a confusing mission and an academic-professional community that is not as strong or interactive as it should be. But the CoP framework also offers possible solutions. This Article shares the author's and others' efforts to improve and align legal ethics. It also outlines what would be essential features for a vibrant community in stewardship of this domain. The Article focuses on the Australian context with close comparison to that of the United States.

Under Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.3, lawyers must ensure that paralegals and other nonlawyer staff members work in a way that is consistent with the ethics obligations placed on [...]

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. SETTING THE SCENE 2 II. CAN LAWYER REPRESENT BOTH PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS? 3 III. PITFALLS OF JOINT REPRESENTATION 5 A. DIVERGENT CURRENT CLIENT INTERESTS 6 1. WHEN [...], Analyzing conflicts of interest is a critical part of the daily life of a lawyer, although the urgency and complexity of conflicts are difficult to teach in a meaningful way. After teaching conflicts to law students enrolled in Professional Responsibility courses and discussing conflicts with lawyers in ethics presentations, the author has developed a method for teaching conflicts of interest that is accessible and (hopefully) memorable. This Article presents that method. By using an evolving fact pattern as the analytical lens for studying conflicts, students learn how conflicts emerge, converge, and diverge as facts develop. Beginning with a personal injury accident that causes a married couple to seek legal advice, the narrative progresses through predictable--and unpredictable--turns. As the narrative evolves, so do the conflicts. By learning conflicts through a focused and evolving lens, law students better understand the complexity of conflicts of interest analysis.

Lawyers work with law. That simple truism explains why law professors assign their law students thousands of pages of court decisions and statutory and regulatory materials each semester. By studying [...]

FOR more than a century, the dominant mode of pedagogy in American law schools has been the Socratic method, first introduced by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell of Harvard Law School [...]