Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
‘the duty of the law schools is to help its students to understand the ultimate significance of the lifework they have undertaken: to see the ultimate purpose of a lawyer's work… .’ [Brainard Currie]
The Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct (ACLEC) has recently called upon academic law teachers of the undergraduate degree in law to take more of an interest in professional ethics. This means that academic law teachers can no longer set the subject aside as something to be dealt with during vocational legal education. Professional ethics must be taught pervasively, ie at each stage of legal education. This paper argues, however, that professional ethics must be taught pervasively in a further sense: even within the undergraduate curriculum, the task of educating tomorrow's lawyers in professional ethics cannot be left to one or more specialists in the subject.