New Scholarship: Giving Voice to Values in Legal Education

Vivien Holmes

A leading approach to ethics training in business schools comes from Professor Mary Gentile’s ground-breaking curriculum, Giving Voice to Values (GVV). What makes GVV so valuable is that it provides students with the specific skills they will need to act upon their values in situations where there are deep pressures to act unethically. Through a structured curriculum that draws on research findings from behavioral ethics, and that employs role plays, case studies, and simulations, students are taught how to develop what is described as a “moral muscle” — where, through practice and preparation, they pre-script and rehearse approaches to acting ethically in difficult situations. Many excellent resources are available to learn more about GVV, including Prof. Gentile’s book, Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right, and a series of videos about GVV narrated by Prof. Gentile and produced by Ethics Unwrapped.

Until recently, little had been written to adapt the GVV approach to the law school environment. That has now changed with an excellent article by Vivien Holmes of Australian National University College of Law (readers might be familiar with her earlier work on behavioral approaches to legal ethics). The just published article, entitled “Giving Voice to Values”: Enhancing Students Capacity to Copy with Ethical Challenges in Legal Practice,” describes ANU’s approach to teaching GVV to more than 600 law students a year (alas, it is behind a pay wall; hopefully, many readers will have access through their institutions).

Here is the abstract:

Legal ethics pedagogy does not often attend to the gap between principles and effective action. A pedagogy that does attend to this gap is ‘Giving Voice to Values’ (GVV). Developed by a US business academic, Mary Gentile, GVV focuses not on the normative questions of ’what is the right thing to do?’ but on the behavioural question ‘how do we get the right thing done?’ GVV has much to offer efforts to foster ethical behaviour in lawyers. In this article, I situate GVV within the behavioural ethics literature, which examines how and why people make the decisions they do in the ethical realm. I then turn to a discussion of the GVV curriculum and a case study of its application in legal education. I report preliminary results from research into the effectiveness of the GVV approach in postgraduate practical legal training. Finally, I encourage legal ethics teachers to experiment with GVV as a way of helping students develop skills for dealing constructively with ethical challenges in legal practice.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in teaching behavioral legal ethics!

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