First Page
469
Abstract
As important,and difficult, as it is to offer new law students clearand helpful frameworks for the interpersonalwork of lawyering, do-ing so is only part of what a clinical textbook may aspire to. In ourtextbook-in-progress, we hope to offer both frameworks and support for students' sense of the incompleteness of every framework and for their recognition of the need for careful,flexible response to each in-dividual client. Even care and flexibility by themselves are notenough, however, and every text must choose which aspects of law- yer-client relationshipsit will emphasize most. In the sections thatfol-low, we focus on lawyers' development of "connection in context," emotional connection and common ground with clients forged even across considerable gaps of difference; on the application of these skills across especially large contextualgaps, as illustratedin an inter-view with a client with a mild intellectualdisability;and on the ethicsand skills of making one specialform of connection with a client, themoral relationship entailed in a "moral dialogue." These dialogues and commentaries explore many complex moments between lawyerand client, but they also reaffirm the central importance of a funda-mental skill and virtue - listening - in the lawyer's work of creating,in each case, a theory of the representation
Repository Citation
Robert Dinerstein, Stephan Ellmann & Isabelle Gunning,
Connection, Capacity and Morality in Lawyer-Client Relationships: Dialogues and Commentary,,
Clinical Law Review
469
(2004).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/565