Doris Del Tosto Brogan (Villanova), Stories of Leadership, Good and Bad: Another Modest Proposal for Teaching Leadership in Law Schools, 45 J. Legal Prof. 183 (2021):
Dangerous leaders. That’s how Anthony Thompson describes lawyers — leaders who are dangerously unprepared for the demands of that role. He argues, and in this article I agree, that law schools must take up the task of educating lawyers to take up the challenges they will face as leaders.
People instinctively turn to lawyers to lead. Despite all the lawyer jokes (and they are legion), lawyers hold what many describe as a disproportionate number of leadership positions — mayors, legislators, chairs, CEO’s, and presidents. There is a reason for this. It is true, as critics argue, that traditional legal education has devoted little conscious time or attention to educating future lawyers for leadership. But while law schools may not have focused consciously on leadership, in many ways, lawyers’ skills are what cause people to trust lawyers as leaders: the ability to make a clear-eyed assessment of the situation, to identify the material facts and the operative constraints, to consider options, to assess risks and opportunities, and to offer a rational plan forward.
Law schools teach this; along with a good bit of legal doctrine, law schools teach critical analysis, analogic reasoning, and problem solving — colloquially called learning to think like a lawyer. These skills do serve a leader well. But are they enough? Probably not. Lawyers have been at the vortex of some of the most spectacular failures of leadership we have witnessed, including ENRON, the Flint Water crisis, and the General Motors ignition cartridge scandal. Do law schools leave graduates dangerously unprepared for the leadership positions they will assume, as Thompson argues?
In this article, I join those who say we do. I set out to make the case that law schools must focus carefully on leadership education, developing a curriculum tailored to the particular needs of future lawyer-leaders. Further, I agree with those who insist that leadership education must include attention to values — real attention, not just a passing reference to values as important, but a willingness to dig into the substance of values. Building on this, I argue that Dr. Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values approach, originally developed for business schools, should be tailored to legal education and should be an essential part of leadership education for lawyers as a means to help students identify and learn to stand up for their own, their institution’s and society’s essential values.
