Administering

in Good Conscience

“Being a good lawyer is a calling,” said Kathy T. Graham, associate dean for academic affairs at the College of Law. “It’s a calling — not quite in the same way as for a minister or a priest — but it is a position that requires you to put the interests of others ahead of your own. It may sound cliché, but I believe we have a special opportunity to help people.”

G

raham said she has seen people’s lives drastically changed by the legal representation they received, for better and for worse. “People put their lives in the hands of attorneys to get results,” she said. “That puts lawyers in a special place. It requires them to exercise the utmost integrity, honesty and concern for others. Ours is a special profession in that regard. A certain level of professional responsibility is expected of them that is much higher than for members of the general public.”

A primary goal of the professionalism program is to help students understand what it means to be a good lawyer. “You can’t change someone’s moral code in three hours,” Graham noted, “but it gets students thinking about what their own conscience says on these issues.” She believes the program also helps raise the level of professionalism in the school. “It lays out for students what we expect of them while they are in law school. It helps establish the tone for professional behavior.”

Graham has helped deliver that message of professional responsibility to Willamette’s law students for more than a decade through the college’s groundbreaking professionalism program. This special orientation for first-year law students, the first of its kind in a West Coast law school, was developed in partnership with the Joint Bench-Bar Commission on Professionalism. In the first hour of their first day of law school, students meet in small groups with bar leaders to discuss ethics. “The idea was to involve students in these issues right off the bat — the first day of their legal careers,” she explained.

Graham noted that no such programs existed when she was a law student. “Since Watergate, law schools have emphasized ethics and professionalism,” she said. “Now it is just another part of the academic program. We talk about issues of professional responsibility and ethics in all law school classes. That wasn’t the case when I was a student.” Graham earned her law degree at the University of California–Davis in 1972, just weeks before the Watergate scandal broke. After graduation, she took a corporate attorney position with Pacific Gas

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