5. Conclusion: The Crucial Importance of Upbringing and Education
It is rather naive to expect lawyers to think and act ethically if they were not brought up and educated under the umbrella of moral values and virtues. Once they enroll to the school of law is already late if not too late but it is nevertheless strongly recommended to introduce an obligatory course on holistic legal ethics in the first year of under-graduate legal studies, accompanied by teaching ethical issues throughout the curriculum and perhaps an additional syllabus on ethics in the last year of law school, as well as during post-graduate studies and training for bar exam.
I have already suggested elsewhere49 that such an approach could serve as a truly holistic method which would cover a number of issues, such as introduction to ethics, ethics and natural law, rhetoric and ethics, multiculturalism, equality, life, health, poverty, personal integrity, environment and climate change, civil disobedience, violence and terrorism, professional responsibility and ethical decision-making and “good lawyering”.
A good, skillful and moral lawyer would feel and know it which international goals are of such a planetary and ethical importance they need to be achieved by mandatory rules; how to construe legally and ethically certain norms, standards and principles; how to implement international treaties in practice; how to adjudicate disputes in the name of justice, how to settle disputes by peaceful means and how to be professional, fair, honest and compassionate at all time. Is it too much to ask?
Hope springs eternal …
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