Judge Posner explains to Ron Collins what we knew all along: the rules of professional responsibility aren’t that important for him.
Question: Insofar as the teaching of legal ethics is concerned, is teaching the rules of professional responsibility and the cases interpreting them enough in your opinion? Or should some significantattention be devoted to familiarizing law students with some of the great works of the Western Philosophical tradition? – say, to Plato’s Gorgias or Aristotle’s Rhetoric (see here at p. 1924)
Posner: I don’t consider instruction in legal ethics an important part of legal education. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is pertinent to the rhetorical dimension of legal practice, rather than to legal ethics. Gorgiascan be read as critical of lawyers’ tricks, though there were no lawyers as such in fourth century b.c. Athens.