Palermo, J; Evans, A --- "Australian Law Students' Values: How They Impact on Ethical Behaviour" [2006] LegEdDig 27; (2006) 14(4) Legal Education Digest 13

Australian Law Students’ Values: How They Impact on Ethical Behaviour

J Palermo & A Evans

[2006] LegEdDig 27; (2006) 14(4) Legal Education Digest 13

15 Legal Educ Rev 1 & 2, 2005, pp 1–23

This paper focuses on the values that underpin legal practitioners’ behaviour. In a globalising legal profession information about the values bases of lawyers is critical to understanding the ways in which a ‘justice agenda’ (arguably, a primary responsibility of the profession) may be sustained into the 21st century.

This paper attempts to investigate what values are characteristic of the mass of Australian lawyers in their last year of law school. It is part of a larger longitudinal study, now nearing completion, which aims to provide longitudinal information about the value sets of these same law students, as they become early-career lawyers and to understand how their values develop or degrade over time.

The actual relationship between the quality of justice and the values/behaviour of its (legal) practitioners is of obvious importance to an international ‘justice priority’, arguably even more so, now that we are facing a choice between whether or not to fully support the Rule of Law within a ‘War on Terror’ context.

The authors have focused on values not only because they may be said to underlie ‘ethics’ at a fundamental level, but also because they are widely discussed nowadays, although rarely investigated. Law schools have always assumed homogeneity in values and it has suited the profession to go along with this view. Having established whether the assumption is empirically correct, the authors then need to ask ‘what role does education play in the reinforcement of personal values appropriate for the legal profession?’ and ‘what attitude can the profession pay to values, in the post-admission context?’

Research that has studied the relationships between values, attitudes and behaviours indicates that there is a weak direct relationship between values and actual behaviours. However, there is evidence of strong relationships between values and behaviour relevant attitudes. These include attitudes towards civil rights, international affairs, religion, political activism and choice of academic area.

While other studies have addressed the effects of values on ethical decision making in an auditing context for accountants and business professionals, this current study is the first Australian study to address, empirically, the effects of values on ethical decision making in the legal context, among legal professionals. The study investigated the impact of value weightings on reported behaviours in a number of ethical scenarios for male and female students in their final year of their law degree. Results are reported here with a minimum of conventional statistical format, before discussion of the educational and re-educational implications.

Law faculties across Australia were asked to assist in distributing surveys to students enrolled in the final year of their law degrees. Seven hundred individuals responded to the mailed questionnaire, representing approximately 18 per cent of a population of 4,000 Australian final-year law students.

To examine the effects of value weightings on ethical decision-making, it was necessary to situate respondents’ responses within contexts that provided for ethical dilemmas. Rather than directly ask students about their values, the authors deployed the practice of the hypothetical situation, adding a personal dimension to further reduce the level of abstraction and assist in actual values identification. The 11 scenarios used to elicit ethical responses are set out in the article. Participants were asked to indicate their probable behaviour and, after reflecting on their decision, to weight the importance in making the decision of a number of behaviour relevant values.

Since the scenarios were also relatively commonplace, it was reasoned that a degree of personal identification with the lawyer’s dilemma (in each scenario) would emerge. Behaviour relevant values specific to each of the scenarios were used as independent variables in analyses of variance of reported behaviour, for each of the 11 ethical scenarios.

While the majority of responses are in the expected direction, the number of participants who indicated they would choose to act in ways that could be generally considered as opposed to the requirements of professional codes of conduct was surprising.

The results of this study indicated a statistically significant association between espoused personal values and ethical decision making. While the behavioural outcomes used in this study were limited to their intentional rather than observed natures, the results do provide evidence of the impact of personal values as predictors of reported behaviours in ethically intensive dilemmas.

While these findings, taken together, do not reflect well on the efforts of law schools to inculcate a ‘justice ethic’ within the basic law degree, they do indicate a greater propensity for female students to be more aware of behavioural relevant values when confronted with ethical dilemmas. These findings, however, need to be interpreted cautiously. A limitation of the design of this study is the inability to distinguish participants’ reported intentions from the effects of social desirability: that is, some respondents may tend to report intentions which they consider to be socially desirable.

On the basis of these first-year results alone, it may be suggested that law student values, and the specific needs of gender groups, generally require more specific attention in curricula than has been the case to date. In short, values awareness, explored in context, is likely to be a more productive route for legal ethics education.