Ethics Programs

› Ethics and Professionalism Library
› Ethics in the Curriculum
› Ethics Speakers' Bureau

Ethics and Professionalism Library

Cooley’s Ethics and Professionalism Library maintains over 3200 volumes of ethics materials. The Ethics and Professionalism Library is open to students, faculty, and attorneys to promote the research and study of ethics and professionalism.

Peter Kempel oversees the Ethics and Professionalism Library and has continued to collect items on ethics and professionalism. Due to his efforts, our ethics and professional responsibility materials in Cooley’s entire collection, as of November 13, 2007, number 2,204 titles and 3,268 volumes.

We hope soon to feature in this library a book written by a number of Cooley’s professionalism faculty and staff about how Cooley has incorporated professionalism into the school’s culture, classrooms, administrative offices, extra- and co-curricular activities, programs, and employee evaluations, including leadership activities. The book, entitled Reflection of a Lawyer's Soul: The Institutional Experience of Professionalism at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, comprises a response to the Carnegie Report on educating lawyers and showcases Cooley’s implementation of the very proposals that report set forth for law schools. Publication is expected in 2008 and royalties will go to the Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism.

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Ethics in the Curriculum

The Center works with Cooley faculty to find interesting and probative methods of incorporating ethics into the required and elective courses in both the JD and LLM programs. Ethics faculty collaborate with the Practice, Advocacy, and Litigation Skills Department to develop a curriculum and opportunities for scholarship, research, and experiences in the area of ethics in dispute resolution. Such collaboration has already led to classes in Mediation and Negotiation & Confrontation.

During 2007, Nancy Wonch and Dale Iverson both worked to incorporate negotiation ethics into Cooley’s Professional Responsibility course, and into the beginning negotiation course Nancy developed. They continue their efforts to develop a Negotiation Ethics course or substantial component to other courses that might some day be part of a concentration on Appropriate Dispute Resolution and Negotiation.

Along with Paul Zelenski and the Career and Professional Development Office, Amy Timmer and Heather Spielmaker developed a two-credit elective course to accompany the Professionalism Portfolio that will focus on developing students’ awareness of themselves, connections to Cooley’s resources, and career-readiness with the hope of increasing our employment statistics after graduation, as well as our graduates’ career satisfaction. In 2007 Cooley’s Curriculum Committee approved a pilot of that course to begin in January 2008.

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Ethics Speakers’ Bureau

Cooley faculty and ethics experts from outside the school make themselves available to train and educate groups interested in ethics and professionalism, such as lawyers, paralegals, students, business owners and executives, local governments, and public interest groups.

In addition to speaking regularly to Cooley students, faculty, and staff groups, we took our ethics message outside the school in speeches and presentations to the following groups in 2007:

In October 2007, we mailed 140 postcards to local bar associations across Michigan offering our availability as ethics speakers.

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