Goal
The Senior project is meant to act as a “capstone” to the major, effectively combining skills and knowledge learned through all the preceding course work. The senior project combines concepts, ideas, and skills learned to create a cohesive project meant to demonstrate the knowledge the student has gained over the course of the major.
- The senior project is intended to be an integration of information learned in all the previous classes, applied to a specific scenario or case. The project would be narrowly focused on one specific topic, while integrating skills and information learned in all the preceding courses.
Approach
My Capstone project evolved over time, changing with the narrowing in on legal ethics, and the beginning of the COVID pandemic. These were the original project ideas I formulated Sophomore year, and it became more refined as time went on.
I settled on the idea of creating an extensive case note based on the format we used to brief cases in Constitutional Law. I began by choosing two cases to focus on, both of which posed unique legal ethics questions. After reading each case and gaining a thorough understanding of the context, I began researching the legal rules in question.
My research branched out here beyond simply the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct as I had originally planned, mostly due to the fact that MN does not provide public access to lawyerly ethics violation documentation. Instead, I found cases from West Virginia, which maintains public records of all instances of the use of the Lawyer Disciplinary Board.
The goal was to analyze these two situations, consider all relevant factors, and apply different ethical lenses to the situations to evaluate the possible courses of actions each lawyer (and overseeing judge) could make. The final Capstone proposal can be found in its entirety here.