Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professors Sherman Cohn and Michael Frisch

LL.M Course 2026 | 2 credit hours

This course endeavors to provide a practical, and practice-oriented (as opposed to academic, philosophical or jurisprudential), approach to the ethical, moral and social issues that lawyers deal with in the practice of their profession. The central objectives are to prepare students to recognize ethical problems when they arise; to identify the pertinent authority--and in particular the ethical code provisions (which we will assume to be the Model Rules of Professional Conduct)--that are most likely to bear on the matter; and to arrive at a sound resolution. Necessary to these ends will be consideration of the ways in which the ethical codes address the often competing interests involved: those of clients, of opposing parties, of non-parties, of the system of justice generally, and of the lawyers themselves. Although the particular focus of the course is on ethical issues, and on the codes and other authority that govern the resolution of such issues, some attention will be paid to putting the subject in a setting that encompasses both a macroscopic view of the role of lawyers in society and a more earth-bound understanding of the processes, disciplinary and compensatory, by which the professional responsibilities of lawyers are enforced.

This course is graded honors-pass-fail and is only open to foreign-trained LL.M. students.