Originally published in Student Lawyer magazine, March 2004 (Vol. 32, No. 7). All rights reserved.

LIAISON NOTEBOOK

Center for Professional Responsibility Opens Doors to Students

by Matt Christensen

Liaison Notebook includes reports of Law Student Division members who represent the Division in the ABA's practice-related sections, divisions, forums, and other entities. Student liaisons promote student membership in their entities and convey the views of law students throughout the ABA. For further information on how you can become a student liaison, visit www.abanet.org/lsd/elections and scroll down to "Liaisons."

Professional Responsibility Is Every Lawyer's Business." With this sentiment, the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility has set its goals higher than ever. Art Garwin, counsel to the Standing Committee on Professionalism, wants to emphasize the impact ethics has on every lawyer. "Joining the center is about establishing the direction of your legal career, supporting the work of the center, and incorporating into your everyday life as a lawyer the values it represents," he says.

Created in 1978, the Center for Professional Responsibility has been a leader in promoting ethical and professional standards in the legal field. Recently, the center opened its membership to law students. The idea is that people who begin their membership in the center during law school end up being strong professionals.

By joining the center for the reduced student membership rate, you'll receive revised editions of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct as they are published; quarterly issues of CenterPiece, the center's membership newsletter, access to the center's "members only" web pages, and discounts on center publications and event registration fees. All of this is available to law students for $20 a year.

"Becoming a member of the center will partner you with some of the most important thinkers in the legal profession and will give you the opportunity to establish yourself in this important community of people," Garwin says.

Seth Rosner, chair of the center's coordinating council, says student membership in the Center for Professional Responsibility is valuable. "Students can think about ethics-not in the abstract, not in class, not preparing for an exam-whenever they receive a center publication, when they have an opportunity to ask a practicing lawyer or the center hotline an ethics question. This is what makes a law student aware that practicing lawyers face ethics issues in our practices far more often than one would think, sometimes daily."

For further information on the Center for Professional Responsibility, visit www.abanet.org/cpr.

Matt Christensen, a law student at Duke University, is student liaison to the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility.