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16 Legal Ethics i (2013)

handle is hein.journals/lethics16 and id is 1 raw text is: 111 Editorial This issue of Legal Ethics shows how broad and deep the field has become. It is now virtually impossible to do any scholarly work in applied ethics and escape the central importance of education to the ethical development of individuals and institutions, and this is underlined by the current issue's collection of articles. Professor Richard Devlin, Justice Adele Kent and Susan Lightstone give a fascinating account of the development of ethics education for judges in Canada. Their paper reveals judges' increasing acceptance of the significance and usefulness of ethics education, and the development of a judicial ethical identity in a contemporary, pluralistic and democratic Canada. Two different sides of law school educa- tion, one potentially promising and the other potentially disturbing, are addressed in the next three papers. Professor Donald Nicolson discusses the enhanced capacity of clinical legal education to develop students' ethical awareness, and outlines the theoretical and practical rationale for what he terms an 'altru-ethical' professional education. An account is given of a Clinical Bachelor of Laws course in Scotland, and the relative success it may have had in instilling more prominent altruistic traits in law graduates. In her article, Dr Lillian Corbin similarly advocates the idea of lawyers as public citizens and, with a focus on American and Australian rules of professional conduct, she draws on philosophies of civic republicanism as the ground for inculcating in lawyers an obligation to advance the public good. The journal returns to Canada for a fourth, and initially more pessimistic, perspective on legal education. Professor Annalise Acorn and Jason Buttuls speculate about the way that a typical Canadian law school education has the potential to exacerbate student inclinations to procrastinate-and therefore to develop habits that themselves can contribute to lawyer indiscipline and hence to client loss. However, their argument does lead Acorn and Buttuls to propose a number of reforms to Canadian legal education that, at the least, could rein- force timely attention to legal work. Interestingly, they choose to support these proposals by using Abraham Lincoln as a model for the diligent lawyer. Amy Salyzyn's article approaches other-albeit fictional-models of lawyers, but from a critical standpoint. Salyzyn identifies that a current concern, especially in the US, has been with what is perceived to be a growth in 'lawyer incivility. The debate this has engendered has revolved around the construction of two ideal type lawyers: the 'gentlemanly' Atticus Finch and'the Rambo-litigator' Her critique centres on the masculinity of both models and consequently exclusionary nature of the debate. Her discussion also reveals the anxieties induced by the changes undergone by the profession in recent decades, which include a sense that traditional forms of authority have been eroded. This implicit reference to the significance of history to the profession leads us nicely into the following article. Dr Sarah Mercer and Clare Sandford- Couch's analysis of the trial of Oscar Wilde also brings together this issue's focus on educational issues and models of legal practice. Although the 'Trial' actually focuses on a prosecution brought by Wilde, its ethical interest lies in defence counsel Sir Edward Carson QC's cross-examination of Wildce. Mercer and Sandford-Couch

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