Forty-five years ago, the Watergate scandal challenged our democratic institutions. The president's allies had burglarized the Democratic National Committee and the president had participated in efforts to obstruct the investigation. Many of those who broke laws and failed in their public trust were lawyers, including President Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell, as well as other government officials and campaign staffers.

Watergate sparked a renewed attention to questions of ethics in government and in the legal profession. How could lawyers devoted to upholding the laws and our democratic institutions fail so badly? How could we prevent such failures in the future?

The legal profession responded with a number of concrete steps. It mandated that law schools teach a course in ethics and professional responsibility and added a test on professional responsibility to the bar exam.

Our law school faced its own Watergate soul-searching. Two of our Fordham Law alumni went to prison for their Watergate crimes⁠—Mitchell and G. Gordon Liddy. In response, our alumnus, Louis Stein, stepped forward to create a prize for "a member of the legal profession whose work embodies the highest standards of the legal profession" and an ethics center to promote those high standards among law students and practicing lawyers.

Today, our democratic institutions are being tested once again. A foreign government has made a concerted effort to influence our elections. The president violates accepted norms of presidential conduct on a daily basis, by refusing to enforce anti-corruption prohibitions, stonewalling congressional oversight, disparaging the press as our enemy and taking children from their parents who are legally seeking asylum and placing them in cage-like confinement.

Once again, many lawyers have come up short. The obvious violators are Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. Additionally, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in June found that Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act.

What about those lawyers who did not obviously violate the law but who failed to uphold high ethical standards and the rule of law? Attorney General William Barr provided a misleading summary of the Mueller report. And what about the lawyers who are complicit in maintaining corrupt practices, stonewalling, and violation of basic freedoms?

The problem is not limited to lawyers associated with a single political party. Michael Avenatti, if convicted on all charges pending against him, could face more than 300 years in prison. In New York, the leaders of both houses of the state legislature were, in recent years, prosecuted on corruption charges.

Why did the post-Watergate reforms fail to prevent so many lawyers from undermining democratic government and rule of law? We can recognize today that rules for lawyers are not the full solution. The problem is cultural and pervasive. Lawyers play a role in the culture in which President Donald Trump has always operated and today epitomizes. The goal too often is that of what Oliver Wendell Holmes described as the bad man who believes that legal and community obligations are measured by what he can get away with. In the legal profession, the equivalent is the extreme partisan who has no accountability for her conduct. When lawyers act as "bad men and women," they teach each other, their clients and civil society that they have no responsibilities to the public good and our democratic institutions.

Training Ethical Lawyers

So what can we do today to train professionally responsible lawyers who can assume their proper ethical role?

First, build on the strengths of the legal profession. We should recognize and applaud those lawyers who have offered a contrasting example, such as the public interest lawyers and private lawyers serving pro bono who flocked to airports to challenge the travel ban and to the southern border to protect families.

Second, educate for leadership. Although we have done a good job of teaching lawyers to be loyal to their clients, we have not done so well at educating them to serve as societal leaders. Law schools should educate for leadership and bar associations should promote it. The goal is not to focus on developing individual heroes, but strong community members who lead by modeling integrity and commitment to democratic values and the rule of law.

Third, teaching legal ethics must go beyond the rules. It must include the basic values of democracy and accountability for the rule of law. It must focus on lawyers' roles as wise counselors who advise clients on their long-term interests in upholding the integrity of our institutions and our social fabric, rather than focusing solely on what they can get away with in the short term. The corporate or governmental client who neglects these values undermines the predicates for its own success. The lawyer as a wise counselor is very much consistent with serving as a zealous advocate.

These reforms are, of course, only a beginning. But for the legal profession and society they provide a blueprint for a renewed effort to protect democratic institutions. So when the next crisis occurs we won't have to ask, "Where are the lawyers?"

Matthew Diller is the dean and Paul Fuller professor of law at Fordham Law School. Russell Pearce, a professor of law at Fordham Law School, holds the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality, and Religion, and co-directs the Stein Center for Law and Ethics.