International Website Pilot

NIFTEP is developing a website intended to become the primary online gathering place and clearinghouse for an international community of ethics teachers, scholars, and practitioners. We hope that the site will act as an organizing tool for efforts to change the culture of legal education and to increase the emphasis on ethics and professionalism education across jurisdictions and throughout law schools’ curricula.

The international website, with initial funding from the NIFTEP and the UK Centre for Legal Education, will provide comprehensive and practical information and materials for university-based law schools, professional legal education, and practitioner-oriented programs. It will fill a gap in the ethics and professionalism materials currently available to professors and practitioners. Though teaching ethics and promoting the development of professionalism are vibrant and important topics in legal education today, and though a considerable amount of information exists around the world about ways to teach legal ethics and promote professionalism, such information is typically targeted only to persons within the author's jurisdiction. Most of this information is available only in conventional print formats and the publications where it is found are again generally known and available only within particular jurisdictions. Although there are a number of websites with information on legal education generally, and on ethics and professionalism specifically, there is no single, comprehensive, internationally-targeted internet portal to access what information does exist. Furthermore, there is no widely accessible website that has useful interactive features.

The international website project will fill this gap. It will:

Consolidate and make easily available a wide range of materials, in both text and multi-media formats, on the teaching of legal ethics and professionalism, and organize these materials into a comprehensive, fully searchable bibliography;
Highlight "best practices" in legal ethics and professionalism instruction and, where possible, provide access to actual teaching materials such as syllabi, class exercises, and course readings;
Provide a forum for original commentary and exchange of ideas on current ethics and professionalism topics for teachers, scholars, practitioners, and the public;
Support change in the culture of legal education; and
Increase the emphasis on legal ethics and professionalism education across jurisdictions and throughout law schools' curricula.

The site will ultimately allow registered users to create their own web pages, upload their teaching materials, download a wide variety of materials created by others (including webcasts and other audio-visual material), post comments, and otherwise participate easily in an international community committed to advancing legal ethics and professionalism. It will serve as a central repository for text and multi-media resources on ethics and professionalism instruction in law schools around the world. It will incorporate or link to existing online ethics resources and will also feature original material by leading experts on ethics and professionalism.

We plan to present a pilot version of the website in late January 2010 at the Learning in Law Annual Conference at the University of Warwick School of Law in the United Kingdom, organized by the UK Centre for Legal Education, the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Law. Though the pilot version will not yet have all of the functions and capabilities listed above, it will give conference participants a comprehensive sense of the website's design, content, and potential. If ongoing funding can be obtained, we hope to present a further updated version of the website at the International Legal Ethics Conference in July 2010 at Stanford Law School and launch soon thereafter.

We have formed an Advisory Board to guide the development of the pilot website. The following persons are members of the Board. For biographies and more information on each member, please click here.

Clark D. Cunningham, W. Lee Burge Professor of Law & Ethics, Georgia State University College of Law (USA) and Director, National Institute for Teaching Ethics and Professionalism;
Nigel Duncan, Principal Lecturer, City Law School, London (UK), and Editor of The Law Teacher: The International Journal of Legal Education;
Adrian Evans, Acting Deputy Dean of Law, Monash University (Australia) and Co-Chair of the Professional Ethics Committee of the International Bar Association;
William Henderson, Professor of Law, Indiana University (USA);
Sally Kift, Professor of Law, Queensland University of Technology (Australia) and one the three inaugural Senior Fellows of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council;
Lawrence C. Marshall, Professor of Law, David and Stephanie Mills Director of Clinical Education, and Associate Dean for Public Interest and Clinical Education (USA);
Julian Webb, Professor of Legal Education, University of Warwick (UK), and Director of the Higher Education Academy's UK Centre for Legal Education; and
Alice Woolley, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary (Canada) and lead author of a widely used Canadian casebook on legal ethics, Lawyer' Ethics and Professional Regulation.