Through role plays set in the context of interaction with clients, fact-finding, negotiation, litigation, and transactional work, this Week One simulation course will teach first-year students how ethics issues arise in practice and how lawyers may run afoul of rules that govern professional responsibility. During the course’s four days, students will be involved in one or more of the following matters:

• A court sanctions hearing relating to allegations of abuses in civil discovery;
• A disciplinary hearing considering conflict of interest claims against in-house counsel because of her alleged representation of both a university and its president during a criminal investigation;
• A simulation of interaction with clients and negotiations relating to the sale of a helicopter;
• A simulation of an internal law firm investigation of alleged associate and partner abuses in billing.

In each of these situations, students, working in teams and in various roles will be assigned responsibility for meeting with clients, fact-finding—reviewing documents and interviewing prospective witnesses, researching pertinent ethics rules, engaging in negotiations, and making arguments either in a court or disciplinary hearing setting. Through these role-playing assignments, students will learn how to analyze rules of professional conduct, engage in fact-finding, and serve as advocates in various settings. Upper-class teaching fellows will serve as clients, potential witnesses, and decision-makers in the disciplinary setting.

This course combines material covered in the two-hour Professional Responsibility course with a broader examination of the legal profession. In addition to the law of lawyering (including the Model Rules of Professional Conduct), the course includes material on the moral underpinnings of law practice, the structure and regulation of the legal profession, and the distribution of legal services. The course uses problems and case studies to enable students to identify ethics issues as they arise in different practice areas, including private practice, government lawyering, criminal defense and prosecution, and public interest practice.

Please see the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic PDF.

For more information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Appellate Litigation Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Appellate Litigation Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

See the Center for Applied Legal Studies website for more detailed information about the clinic.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Center for Applied Legal Studies PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Civil Rights Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Civil Rights PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Communications and Technology Law Clinic (IPR) website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Communications and Technology Law Clinic (IPR) PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

This course will focus on the optimal functioning of privately-held and U.S. publicly-listed companies, as well as on the duties of directors and their advisors in times of crisis or significant change for the corporation.  At the conclusion of this seminar, you will have navigated multiple real-life crises that the largest public and private companies face in the course of their business, and will be equipped to play a significant advisor role to corporate boards or other stakeholders requiring commercially-savvy legal representation in corporate crises.  These are the matters that involve the country’s most experienced and capable corporate boards, advised by the best-in-class law firms, investment banking firms, public relations firms, and consulting firms, among other advisors.  Over the course of the semester, the class will analyze eight case studies for public and private companies facing a material, and in some cases, company-threatening crisis.  The course will immerse students in the most commonly recurring disruptive events that cause trauma to private and public companies.  Those disruptive events include commercial failure of the company, allegations of fraud, antitrust inquiries, activist aggression, SEC investigations, DOJ or federal or state Attorney General investigations, senior executive failures or departures, public relations crises, company-threatening civil or criminal litigation, political interference, competitive displacement, and the other most frequently-recurring fact patterns.  We will first identify and analyze the legal issues that frame the viable legal options, and then identify and evaluate the commercial interests of the company.  Within that legal and commercial framing, we will analyze the self-interests, objectives, and risk-reward calculus that drive each stakeholder’s likely decisions and actions.  

We will then role play the response plan to address the crisis, with each student playing a different role – some students will constitute the corporate board, both management and independent directors, some will role play the largest public or private shareholders, one or more will be the company’s founder(s) where relevant, and the remaining students will be the lawyers representing these and other relevant stakeholders. The seminar will focus on mastery of the legal and commercial framework that frames the viable decision trees, as well as mastery of the skills and considerations necessary to navigate the dynamics and multi-dimension nature of corporate crises. This course will also focus on the fundamental record-establishing legal documents that reflect corporate board decision-making through crises, including the preparation of presentations, agendas, resolutions, minutes, and other legal, business, and strategy documents for boards and board committees. 

Professor Green will provide case studies a week in advance along with the roles each student will play.  The students will then use the week leading up to each class to conduct legal and other research, to communicate amongst themselves, with other classmates, and with external stakeholders and shareholders. The Chair/CEO will present the facts of each case and run the board meeting with the assistance of the General Counsel, the CFO, and other stakeholders.  Professor Green will lead follow-up sessions to discuss and critique each management team’s presentation and materials and the performance of the students assuming each role.  

In addition to prepared case studies, Professor Green will provide reading materials taken from the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist, and the other leading business-focused media reporting on current real-life corporate crises.  We will discuss and analyze the circumstances attendant to on-going public corporate events, and will apply what we are learning in our simulations to what is likely unfolding in the boardroom in these actual situations.  Students will learn the legal and commercial framing of these scenarios and will gain insight into what is likely happening behind the scenes to manage each reported crises we study.  

In addition to the case studies, we will spend several classes reviewing and discussing the reading materials and will have panel discussions as well, including guest panelists who are expert lawyers and senior executives at companies who have worked through significant corporate crises. 

In this seminar we will simulate meetings of a board of directors of US listed public companies facing significant challenges or threats. Every two weeks, the class will examine a case study for a company in crisis. The class will be divided into teams of three to four students who will serve as members of management to conduct a board meeting. Typically, the students will serve as Chairman of the Board/CEO and other members of management, including General Counsel, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Operating Officer, although those positions may vary, depending upon the details of the case. The student teams may also elect to have team members serve as outside financial, legal, or communications advisors to management and the board. The balance of the class will act as board members and will receive position descriptions for their director respective roles. Every two weeks, the board will face one or more corporate governance challenges as the company confronts a crisis. This course will emphasize the preparation of presentations, agendas, resolutions, minutes, and other legal, business, and strategy documents for boards and board committees. As stated above, student teams will take turns serving as the Chairman of the Board/CEO, General Counsel, and Chief Financial Officer (or a different member of the management team, as deemed appropriate), leading the board of directors through a discussion of the most critical issues in each case study. The management presenters will have two weeks leading up to each class to conduct legal and other research, to communicate amongst themselves, with other classmates, and with external stakeholders and shareholders (as played by Professor Kamerick). The Chairman/CEO will present the facts of case and run the board meeting with the assistance of the General Counsel, the CFO, and other members of management. Professor Kamerick will lead follow up sessions to discuss and critique each management team’s presentation and materials and the performance of the students assuming the roles of board members. The course will focus on the customary functioning of United States publicly listed companies, as well as on the duties of directors and their advisors in times of crisis or significant change for the corporation.

Please see the Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Criminal Defense and Prisoner Advocacy Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Criminal Justice Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Criminal Justice Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Domestic Violence Clinic website for more information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Domestic Violence Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

This course provides students with an opportunity to consider and address the ethical issues that attorneys frequently encounter in different kinds of modern-day tax practice, either tax planning or controversy. Such contemporary issues relate to conflicts of interest, evidentiary privileges and confidentiality duties, tax return preparer penalties, tax opinion standards, tax shelters, federal-court petitions for injunctive relief and for review under the Administrative Procedure Act, and rules governing disciplinary proceedings. To help students to grapple with these issues, both individually and in collaboration with fellow students, this course will provide a legal framework and tools to analyze and address the tax lawyer's legal and professional obligations under the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, as adopted by state disciplinary authorities, Treasury Department Circular No. 230 (the regulations governing practice before the Internal Revenue Service), and the Internal Revenue Code’s penalty provisions.

Please see the Federal Legislation Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Federal Legislation Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

Please see the Rising for Justice (Housing Advocacy and Litigation Clinic) website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Rising for Justice (Housing Advocacy and Litigation Clinic) PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

This course examines key issues arising from the criminalization of transnational business conduct and attempts to enforce national laws extraterritorially, as well as how to counsel clients to comply with inconsistent or conflicting legal regimes. Topics covered will include: bribery of foreign officials, crime on the internet, economic embargoes and export and reexport controls, securities fraud, money laundering, and price-fixing. Attention will be paid to foreign governmental opposition to U.S. assertions of jurisdiction via "blocking" statutes, secrecy laws, and use of local court injunctions, as well as to mechanisms for resolving jurisdictional conflicts, including international agreements for notification, consultation, mutual legal assistance, "positive comity," and exchanges of confidential information among enforcement authorities. The course will also focus extensively on compliance and ethics issues and on techniques for dealing with government law enforcement agencies.

Please see the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

Please see the Juvenile Justice Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

For registration-specific supplemental materials, please see the Juvenile Justice Clinic PDF.

For information about clinic registration generally, please see the Clinic Registration Handbook.

The point of this course is to provide the tools and some of the experience of working in or with a large law firm pro bono practice. We do this through three primary means: lecture (not just from the professors, but also from law firm and legal services leaders in the community); reading current materials on pro bono and the state of the legal market; and role-playing, using our mock law firm, Rodriguez Zimmerman & Drysdale. Each student will have a specific role in that fictional law firm, and we will provide access to more firm financial information than you will likely have at any other firm when you start (and certainly more than you would ever have from the outside). Alas, it is fictional – but trust us, it is realistic.
To understand how pro bono works in a large law firm, you first need to be familiar with how a large law firm itself works, both internally and in the market. The beginning of this course focuses on what we broadly call “law firm economics,” but just as well could be called “operations” or “management” or “finance.” We want you to understand these subjects so that you can answer this question – and then argue or defend the answer in the future: how is it that the Top 100 revenue-producing law firms in the United States contribute, on average, about 60 hours of free legal services per attorney each year? What does the donation of 1½ weeks of productivity do to the firm’s bottom line?
Then we will focus on the how and why of pro bono practice. Where did this impulse to provide free legal services come from? How do law firms decide which matters to take, and which to decline? There is a vigorous debate in the law firm pro bono community about “what counts” as pro bono work – there is even a small treatise with that very name (included in the reading materials). Beyond the issue of qualification, how do law firms determine their pro bono priorities? How does pro bono fit within larger law firm management goals?
We will also explore pro bono from other points of view: public interest providers, law schools, corporate in-house counsel and the media. What role do these organizations play in the provision of pro bono legal services, and how do they interact with large law firm pro bono practices?

This course will examine critically the law governing lawyers' ethics. The course will address the role of the lawyer in an adversary system, professional ethics and personal morality, the allocation of decision-making between lawyer and client, zealous representation, lawyer-client trust and confidence, conflicts of interest, preparing and examining witnesses, client perjury, prosecutors' ethics, judicial ethics, solicitation of clients, and the ethics of torture. Readings will include the rules and standards of professional conduct, case law, legal scholarship, and anecdotal materials. Class discussion will be based on these materials as well as excerpts from film and television. This course will be of special interest to those interested in criminal law, public interest law, and litigation generally.

Please note: This is not a preparation course for the MPRE. Many of the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct will be assigned, and you will be expected to have a working familiarity with them. However, the Model Rules will not be the focus of the course except in the context of broader discussions of lawyers' professional conduct in an adversary system. The emphasis of the class will be principally, but not exclusively, on litigation in the criminal context. Although differing ethical views will be discussed, the instructor will emphasize a client-centered view of lawyers’ ethics, rooted in the Bill of Rights. The examination will be closed-book.

In 2025, many lawyers and commentators have expressed alarm at frontal attacks against law firms, lawyers, and judges by the executive branch of government. With good reason, they call these attacks on the rule of law itself. But what is the rule of law? To most people, the phrase is an abstraction. For many, it may call to mind endless red tape, time-consuming sludge, speed cameras and parking tickets, probation officers, unpleasant or downright dangerous encounters with the police, expensive lawyers, stern judges Why, people might ask, should we care about the rule of law?

The aim of this seminar is to think both philosophically and practically about this question. I plan to organize the seminar around five themes.

Theme 1: The seminar will examine theoretical writings on the rule of law, by classical philosophers as well as contemporaries, to address questions such as the following:

1. Is the rule of law only a procedural value, or is it substantive?
2. Is the rule of law value-neutral, so that it is indifferent between good laws and evil laws? For these first two questions, the main readings will be well-known analyses of the rule of law by Lon Fuller, Joseph Raz, and John Rawls.
3. How does the rule of law connect with other legal values: the separation of powers, constitutionalism, democracy, and “ordered liberty”? Readings may draw from Montesquieu, the Federalist Papers, and Tocqueville.
4. A crucial point: “the rule of law” is an abbreviation of a longer phrase: “the rule of law, not of men”. The “rule of men” is personalist and autocratic; at its worst, it is tyranny. We will therefore examine how law functions in tyrannies. Here, I will introduce Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the “dual state” – his description of the Nazi legal system, where the legal system (what he called the “normative state”) never went away, but which had a dictatorship (the “prerogative state”) layered on top of it. I may use excerpts from Fraenkel, but may instead use Douglas Morris’s excellent biography of Fraenkel, Legal Sabotage.

Theme 2: The seminar will then turn to the question of what role lawyers play in maintaining (or subverting) the rule of law. This is partly an issue in legal theory, but also an issue about lawyers’ ethics. Do lawyers have any special responsibility to uphold the rule of law? Do lawyers’ ethical standards, such as the prohibition on frivolous filings, candor to courts, independent advice, and avoidance of conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice imply a duty to uphold the rule of law? What about lawyers who use their skills to dismantle elements of the rule of law? Readings may include some of my own work on legal ethics, as well as Scott Cummings’s award-winning paper Lawyers in Backsliding Democracies.

Theme 3: Are lawyers morally or legally accountable for the causes they represent or the way they represent them? Here, the central reading will be Brad Wendel’s recent book Canceling Lawyers: Case Studies of Accountability. We will also ask whether the lawyer disciplinary system is an adequate safeguard against lawyers whose overt aim is to undermine the rule of law.

Theme 4: One dramatic failure of the rule of law is the lack of access to justice. We will study this through a reading of another recent book: Renee Knake Jefferson, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis.

Theme 5: The 2025 attack on lawyers and law firms by the executive branch of government. Here, we will examine the executive orders punishing law firms for representing clients disfavored by the president, along with agreements by several major firms to accede to presidential wishes in advance of executive orders. We’ll look not only at the legality of the executive orders, but also the conduct of the lawyers who write them and the law firm leaders who surrender. Here, the reading will be legal texts: the executive orders, briefs in lawsuits challenging them, any judicial opinions that have issued in those lawsuits, reactions such as associates’ letters, and news items.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. To examine the current crisis in the legal profession and the rule of law.

2. To study the philosophical underpinnings of the rule of law.

3. To study some of the best recent literature on theoretical legal ethics and access to justice.

Students in the Policy Clinic provide services to make democracy work several policy themes. Recent projects include:

• Community equity – Combat gentrification and displacement in low-income communities of color, develop a community support fund, develop a community resilience hub.
• Health and food – Organize a consortium to improve working conditions in university food supply chains, expand access to oral health services, reinvent a better food chain for institutions (universities, hospitals, schools, and shelters), analyze social determinants of health (housing, food security, etc.) for state health officials.
• Labor and human rights – Organize a consortium to improve working conditions in university food supply chains (same as health above), protect worker rights in global supply chains for the FIFA World Cup and other mega-sporting events.
• Trade and climate – Develop mutually supporting climate and trade policies, develop options for international cooperation on climate policies through “climate clubs,” recommend strategies to decarbonize steel production without violating WTO rules, and identify strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions while preserving manufacturing jobs.

Please see the Policy Clinic website for more detailed information about the program.

Learning outcomes for this clinic: Students are supervised, evaluated and graded on three skill sets, each of which has specific evaluation criteria in the Policy Clinic Operations Guide.

1. Management and professionalism – includes “managing up” with supervision meetings, initiating self-evaluation, managing effort and deadlines, collaborating, and expectations in a professional culture.
2. Analysis and strategy – covers legal, policy and strategic analysis.  It includes identifying issues that require analysis, learning the context efficiently, using diverse sources to avoid bias, explaining analytic methods, using a logical framework, and drawing conclusions that meet client needs.
3. Communication, writing and speaking – includes organizing documents and presentations, meeting audience needs for context and decision-making, relating analysis through stories and examples, presenting visual information, and editing for plain language, clarity, and English style.

Overview: This short course will focus on the ethical and constitutional responsibility of lawyers for the federal government, especially in periods when administration policies are straining at the boundaries of the law. This has obvious relevance now, but it has at other times in recent history as well. Although we are still working out the details, what follows is our tentative sketch of what the seven sessions will cover.

Learning objectives: The main objective is to give students a deeper understanding of the professional responsibility of government lawyers, which gets only brief coverage in most professional responsibility courses. A second is to help them understand the constitutional as well as professional obligations of government lawyers. And a third is to help them better understand the role of lawyers in the current flurry of government activity.

This course will focus on lawyers' relationships with clients, opposing parties, the courts, and the public. Problems of professional responsibility are treated in several contexts, including the lawyer's duties to the client, the lawyer's reconciliation of duties to multiple clients, and the lawyer's reconciliation of client obligations with the demands of justice and the public interest. Although the focus of the course is on lawyers' ethical responsibilities, attention will be paid to the important role that lawyers play in advancing client interests and in self-regulating their profession.

Learning Objectives:

The central objectives are to prepare students to recognize ethical problems when they arise; to identify the pertinent authority--including the ethical code provisions (which we will assume to be the Model Rules of Professional Conduct)--that most likely bear on the matter; and to arrive at a sound resolution.

This course endeavors to provide a practical, and practice-oriented (as opposed to academic, philosophical or jurisprudential), approach to the ethical, moral and social issues that lawyers deal with in the practice of their profession. The central objectives are to prepare students to recognize ethical problems when they arise; to identify the pertinent authority--and in particular the ethical code provisions (which we will assume to be the Model Rules of Professional Conduct)--that are most likely to bear on the matter; and to arrive at a sound resolution. Necessary to these ends will be consideration of the ways in which the ethical codes address the often competing interests involved: those of clients, of opposing parties, of non-parties, of the system of justice generally, and of the lawyers themselves. Although the particular focus of the course is on ethical issues, and on the codes and other authority that govern the resolution of such issues, some attention will be paid to putting the subject in a setting that encompasses both a macroscopic view of the role of lawyers in society and a more earth-bound understanding of the processes, disciplinary and compensatory, by which the professional responsibilities of lawyers are enforced.

Learning Objectives:

The central objectives are to prepare students to recognize ethical problems when they arise; to identify the pertinent authority – and in particular the ethical code provisions (which we will assume to be the Model Rules of Professional Conduct) – that are most likely to bear on the matter; and to arrive at a sound resolution.

This course examines, against the background of the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct, the professional and ethical obligations and duties of the lawyer in today's society. A quick overview of the organized bar and the restrictions on the profession against such practices as solicitation precedes an in-depth examination of the lawyer's relationship with and obligations to his/her client as well as the additional and frequently clashing obligations which the lawyer owes the court, adversaries, and other persons. The course also includes a summary treatment of disciplinary proceedings and a discussion of the lawyer's professional obligation with respect to broad social problems, such as the distribution of legal services and the representation of unpopular clients and causes. The focus of each professor may vary, e.g., ethics in government, the large private law firm, public interest law, or criminal law.

This course addresses the ethical requirements that govern the practice of law and satisfies the Professional Responsibility requirement for graduation.

The goal of this course is to equip students with the knowledge required to recognize and navigate any future ethical dilemma they may encounter as attorneys. Students should develop a strong foundational understanding of both the ABA Model Rules and the state ethical rules in the jurisdiction where they plan to practice. Instruction will be focused on imparting a practical skill set that students can rely on when beginning their journey as attorneys. Students should come away with an understanding of the importance of adhering to higher moral and ethical standards as officers of the court. Students should also develop an intellectual curiosity (or a healthy fear) that inspires them to stay informed of the disciplinary law in their jurisdiction as they move forward in their careers.

This course will provide a general overview of the law governing lawyers, as well
as explore problems of professional responsibility in various areas of practice. Our
principal framework will be the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct
(“Model Rules”), which have been widely adopted. We also will review judicial
decisions, statutes, and other sources to understand the myriad rules that apply to
lawyers’ conduct.

This course will provide a practical and practice-oriented approach to the ethical, moral, and societal issues facing lawyers in their everyday practice. We will focus on lawyers’ relationships with clients, the legal profession, the courts, and the public. Problems of professional responsibility will be examined in several contexts, including the lawyer’s duties to the client, the lawyer’s reconciliation of duties to multiple clients, special duties for prosecutors, and the lawyer’s reconciliation of client obligations with the demands of justice and the public interest. We will use the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as a proxy for the states’ ethical rules governing lawyers.

This course approaches Professional Responsibility from a practical and practice-oriented perspective (as opposed to an academic, historical, philosophical or jurisprudential one) and is intended to equip new lawyers to recognize ethical issues as they arise, identify the relevant rules and resources available that address those issues, and provide a framework for thinking about the best resolution while considering the potential consequences for the attorney, client and any other relevant actors who are involved.

The course will: (1) provide an overview of the rules of professional conduct, using the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct as a baseline, but discussing variations in other jurisdictions, primarily the District of Columbia, (2) apply the rules to fact patterns intended to highlight common issues attorneys confront in specific contexts, focusing on practice in a firm environment, and (3) address an attorney’s liability for legal malpractice (and other potential consequences, such as criminal liability) against the backdrop of the rules of professional conduct.

This two-credit Professional Responsibility course will provide students with a roadmap for analyzing real-world legal ethics dilemmas. We will closely examine the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (MRPC) and consider differences between the MRPC, the DC rules, and those of other jurisdictions. But knowing the rules is only the beginning of ethical practice--because they can be surprisingly difficult to apply to specific situations, we will focus on underlying principles and the ways in which particular rules can conflict with each other and with a lawyer's instincts and best intentions. We will also discuss lawyers' duties to the profession, to society, and to their own sense of morality, including representing (or refusing to represent) persons or policies that are unpopular or personally repugnant. Finally, the course will introduce students to the attorney disciplinary process.

The basic two-credit Professional Responsibility course examines the professional and ethical obligations and duties of the lawyer in today's society. It examines the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. We spend considerable time discussing the real-life application of the rules to the practice of law. We examine the relationship of attorney to client, the relationship of attorney to the judicial system, some special rules for government lawyers, and the attorney's ethical duty as a professional in relation to a moral duty to him or her self as well as to society as a whole, including representing (or refusing to represent) persons who are unpopular, guilty, or personally repugnant. 

This course endeavors to provide a practical, and practice-oriented (as opposed to academic, philosophical or jurisprudential), approach to the ethical, moral and social issues that lawyers deal with in the practice of their profession. The central objectives are to prepare students to recognize ethical problems when they arise; to identify the pertinent authority--and in particular the ethical Rules found in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct--that are most likely to bear on the matter; and to arrive at a sound resolution. Necessary to these ends will be consideration of the ways in which the ethical codes address the often competing interests involved: those of clients, of opposing parties, of non-parties, of the system of justice generally, and of the lawyers themselves. Although the particular focus of the course is on ethical issues, and on the codes and other authority that govern the resolution of such issues, some attention will be paid to putting the subject in a setting that encompasses both a macroscopic view of the role of lawyers in society and a more earth-bound understanding of the processes, disciplinary and compensatory, by which the professional responsibilities of lawyers are enforced.

This course will provide a general overview of the law governing lawyers, as well
as explore problems of professional responsibility in various areas of practice. Our
principal framework will be the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct
(“Model Rules”), which have been widely adopted. We also will review judicial
decisions, statutes, and other sources to understand the myriad rules that apply to
lawyers’ conduct.

This course will provide a practical and practice-oriented approach to the ethical, moral, and societal issues facing lawyers in their everyday practice. We will focus on lawyers’ relationships with clients, the legal profession, the courts, and the public. Problems of professional responsibility will be examined in several contexts, including the lawyer’s duties to the client, the lawyer’s reconciliation of duties to multiple clients, special duties for prosecutors, and the lawyer’s reconciliation of client obligations with the demands of justice and the public interest. We will use the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as a proxy for the states’ ethical rules governing lawyers.

Professional Responsibility: Advocacy and Ethics in Practice is a two-credit course in which through simulation involving interaction with clients, fact-finding, negotiation, and litigation, students will learn how ethical and values dilemmas arise in advocacy and practice settings and how ethical rules and other forms of regulation address them. During the semester, simulation exercises may include:

• A court sanctions hearing relating to alleged abuses in civil discovery;
• A simulation of interactions with a client and opposing counsel during a difficult contract negotiation
• An internal law firm investigation of alleged associate and partner abuses in billing;
• A disciplinary hearing relating to in-house counsel’s alleged complicity in his company’s fraudulent misconduct; and
• A meeting with a virtual law firm client in which advice is given on how to avoid unauthorized practice of law and marketing restriction in a multi-jurisdiction practice.

Learning Objectives:

1. Knowledge about professional responsibility requirements and ambiguity.
2. Ability to engage in critical strategic thinking when analyzing professional responsibility issues
3. Ability to develop and sharpen creative problem-solving skills
4. Ability to work collaboratively on matters assigned to a team
5. Ability to engage in effective and persuasive oral and written advocacy

Public interest lawyering is counter-cultural in the legal profession, but the substantive law governing lawyers is generally the same regardless of practice area. This course examines the regulation of the legal profession with a focus on the ethical issues most often encountered by public interest lawyers. Most class meetings will be devoted to applying the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and other lawyer law to problems chosen from the text and other sources. Issues will include confidentiality and publicity; allocation of decision-making authority; conflicts of interest between individual clients and the broader client community or particular social justice movement; settlement and fee shifting; and special problems in organizational, class, and mass representation. The course will also examine the history of public interest law, issues confronting the public interest movement, and career options.

Studying the legal profession, and particularly its code of ethics, is fascinating! May a lawyer rat on her client who is planning to kill someone? If a lawyer thinks that his client, a start-up technology company, is likely to be a big success, may the lawyer ask for stock in the company in lieu of a fee? May a prosecutor impersonate a defense lawyer in order to save lives? May a lawyer represent two criminal co-defendants? Must a prosecutor turn in his best friend, a fellow prosecutor who has concealed evidence from a criminal defendant?

In this course, you will read almost no judicial opinions. Instead, you will work on about forty ungraded problems, most of which are based on real situations that lawyers faced. Instead of reading autopsies of cases (that is, appellate opinions), the required readings will provide you you with the relevant legal framework (the Rules of Professional Conduct and other law that governs lawyers). The assigned problems will ask you to step into the shoes of a lawyer who has to make a critical decision, often caught between conflicting loyalties. It will be your job to think about what you would do in that situation, taking account all of the relevant factors. You will not have to submit your decisions and analyses in writing, but you will be expected to formulate them before class and to be prepared to discuss the reasons for your decisions during the class.

Almost every class will include one or two periods in which you will discuss a problem in small groups before we discuss it in the class as a whole, though we will discuss some problems without first having a small group discussion. You will use your laptop or mobile phone to cast anonymous votes registering what you would do as the problems unfold. The class discussions will explore and evaluate the legal, ethical and strategic justifications for each possible course of action. After the discussion of each problem, the instructor will reveal what happened in the real case on which the problem was based.

This is a three-credit section of the course and therefore a deeper dive into the subject than a two-credit offering. If you elect this section, you should plan to:

(a) attend almost all classes (except in the case of illness, religious observance or other compelling reason),

(b) do almost all of the assigned reading,

(c) analyze the assigned problems before each class (as if they were problem sets for a math or science course, though they are not math or science problems),

(d) participate in class discussions (the instructor does not do cold calling but expects a lot of volunteering, and the strongest class participants will have a small grading advantage) and

(e) vote in the frequent anonymous in-class polls. 

Everyone has a different learning style. This section of the professional responsibility course will be most engaging for students who engage in these five aspects of “active learning” rather than merely taking notes.

The textbook for the course will be Lisa G. Lerman, Philip G. Schrag, and Robert Rubinson, ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN THE PRACTICE OF LAW (6th edition, 2023).  (Note: because some of the problems require more class time than others, the reading assignments in this course are necessarily of uneven lengths. Two of the classes have long reading assignments, and two others have very short reading assignments). Also required is a supplement: Lerman, Schrag and Gupta, Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law: Model Rules, State Variations, and Practice Questions (2025-2026 edition). You should use the paper rather than the electronic editions of these books, because the exam will be an open book take-home test, with access to hard drives allowed, but you will not be permitted to go on line during the test. The professor also might assign short readings about current events involving legal ethics or the legal profession.

The course will incidentally help you to prepare for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE). However, unlike the MPRE questions, which have clear-cut answers, most of the problems discussed in the course have pros and cons for various plausible courses of action. Therefore, the course is not an MPRE prep course, but it is an MPRE PLUS course.

The professor has created a document with a summary of the learning goals for this course.

This class considers lawyers’ professional responsibilities through the lens of legal practice in the 21st Century. During the last decade, economic forces and the emergence of new technologies have roiled the legal services sector. At the same time, the pandemic has exposed an ever-deepening crisis in access to civil justice, experienced by a large portion of Americans. Meanwhile in the political sphere, lawyers have been enlisted in the service of anti-democratic forces that threaten the rule of law.  The course will be devoted to discussing what these trends mean for the regulation of lawyers and law as a profession. This course satisfies the professional responsibility requirement, but is not intended to prepare you for the MPRE. The course does not satisfy the credit requirements for students who need the LL.M. to become eligible to sit for the NY Bar.

This course explores the legal principles and rules that govern lawyers and law practice. We will use the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as our framework and cover topics that include the regulation of lawyers, legal malpractice, the formation and termination of the attorney-client relationship, the duties of confidentiality, zealous representation and candor to the court, the lawyer's duties to adversaries and third parties, conflicts of interest, the attorney/client privilege and the work product doctrine. We will take a problem-oriented approach and make ethical arguments in class with respect to assigned problems to help students develop the analytical tools to identify and resolve ethical issues. Our approach to solving ethical problems will use traditional methods of legal analysis, real life experiences, and theories of decision making that recognize the biases that can lead to error. We will consider situations where what seems like the right course of action may be unethical. We will also discuss how adhering to ethical rules can help make a technically competent lawyer into a great lawyer. And we will analyze how being an ethical lawyer can lead to a meaningful professional life and contribute to the public good by providing pro bono legal services and using ethical rules to help preserve a free and democratic society.

Learning Objectives:

The goals of this course are:

1. to master the core Rules of Professional Conduct and related substantive and procedural law;
2. to recognize ethical issues early before it is too late to resolve them;
3. to learn to make compelling arguments on legal ethics issues and to resolve those issues;
4. to explore how the ethical lawyer can be professionally fulfilled;
5. to recognize the pressures and stresses of practicing law and the importance of taking action to address them;
6. to apply insights from the field of psychology to avoid bias in resolving ethical issues;and
7. to find happiness in the practice of law.

This skills-based simulation course will introduce students to the essential skills of social intelligence needed in all forms of a law practice—including law firms, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and solo practice. Students will learn about emotional intelligence and the factors that affect their abilities to interact with clients, co-workers, and opposing counsel. Students will study neuroscientific and psychological research that illustrates how basic brain function and other factors, such as strong emotion, influence how a person makes decisions. With this knowledge, students will develop strategies to improve their own decisions and to interact effectively with clients, colleagues, and opposing counsel as they engage in various types of decision-making. Using a combination of lecture, discussion, videos, skills exercises, and simulations of legal practice scenarios, this course will emphasize concrete, practical tools to increase students’ effectiveness in managing themselves and their interactions with others. The course will equip students to effectively communicate with others, present information in a persuasive light, recognize and address their own internal biases, and deal with interactions they may find difficult. Students completing this course will have developed a solid grasp on how to address the wide variety of interpersonal dynamics that commonly arise in the legal arena.

Learning Objectives:

The main objectives of this course are to increase students’ awareness of the substantial role of social intelligence in the practice of law and to provide students with concrete skills to effectively handle day-to-day interactions. Students will learn research-based skills and strategies from the fields of neuroscience, the study of emotions and emotional intelligence, negotiation, and communication. As they learn theory, students will have the opportunity to practice techniques for harnessing these dynamics in professional interactions commonly involved in the actual practice of law. The simulations will emphasize positive strategies for dealing with common interpersonal interactions in a legal practice: lawyer–client, lawyer–opposing counsel, and lawyer–colleague. At the end of the course, students will have an improved ability to effectively communicate and negotiate, present information in a persuasive light, recognize and address internal biases, and deal with interactions they may find difficult—skills that talented legal minds need to become great counselors at law.

Please see the Street Law website and this video for more information about the course.

Please see the Street Law website and this video for more information about the course.

OVERVIEW: Street Law Mock Trial Advocacy is a project-based practicum course where Georgetown Law students teach a mock trial advocacy course at D.C. public high schools (day students) or the D.C. Jail (evening students). Enrolled law students develop and refine critical lawyering skills, including legal research and writing, time and project management, public speaking, and the capacity to engage diverse audiences in a low-risk, high-reward environment. Street Law instructors help the local community better understand the law, identify how it impacts them, and develop legal and analytical skills. In short, Street Law instructors have a tangible impact on the lives of local residents. 

The spring semester focuses on trial and litigation skills. Street Law instructors prepare their students to compete in a mock trial tournament. The law students develop a thorough understanding of trial procedure, law, and practical advocacy skills. This practicum allows law students to actively give back to the local community while gaining invaluable lawyering skills.

SEMINAR: The seminar uses interactive instruction to explore law and legal concepts, classroom management, lesson planning, and student assessment. Law students have time to collaborate with their peers and also gain access to additional lessons they can use in their classes. Outside the seminar, faculty provide intensive support and collaborate with each student to support their learning and growth.

PROJECT WORK: The placements are determined primarily by the law students’ schedules for the semester. Law students will work at least 10 hours/week preparing for and teaching a practical law and trial advocacy course. Guiding high school students through the mock trial process is remarkable and unforgettable. Law student instructors are responsible for instructing and grading their students. Street Law faculty and fellows observe each law student instructor and conduct post-observation debriefs at least three times per semester. 

Regular and punctual attendance is required at all practicum seminars, field placements, and scheduled events. If a student misses a seminar, a Street Law event, or project work, they must speak to the Street Law faculty as soon as possible to discuss the absence. Unless the professor indicates otherwise, a student with more than one unexcused absence from the practicum seminar or one week of unexcused absences from the fieldwork or project work may receive a lower grade or, at the professor’s discretion, may be withdrawn from the practicum course.

ORIENTATION: A three-day orientation is held from Tuesday, January 7, through Thursday, January 9, 2026. During orientation, Law students will experience the student-centered teaching methodology they will use in their own classes and have a chance to practice facilitating before entering the classroom. Attendance at the orientation is mandatory. Evening division students should contact the Street Law faculty to discuss orientation schedule conflicts. Attendance at this orientation is mandatory for students who have not already taken the Street Law: Criminal Justice and Human Rights practicum in the fall semester.

MEETING INFO

Thursdays, 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.

This course focuses on women and leadership. The class is not about organizational or systemic change, but is solely focused on individual skill building. The class is peer-driven and students will work in teams and receive feedback from peers on papers and oral exercises. Students will also reflect both individually and with the group on what you expect from your career and develop strategies for achieving those goals.  Topics include:  self-advocacy, career pathing, navigating organizational politics, and networking. There will be distinguished guest speakers, who will share their experiences. perspectives, and advice. These conversations will be supplemented with cases and readings about women leaders, as well as a review of the current state of empirical evidence about the status of women as leaders. 

Course Goals/Student Learning Outcomes:

• Develop self-advocacy tactics and styles.

• Develop critical and strategic thinking skills.

• Improve communication skills, both oral and written.

• Develop team and collaborative skills.