Name: Roy Stuckey

Title: Professor

School: University of South Carolina

Mailing Address:

Main and Greene Sts,

Columbia, SC 29208

Phone: 803/777-2278

Email: roy@law.law.sc.edu

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Summary Description:

I feel very uncomfortable submitting this on my behalf. It seems more appropriate to reward the school for the Center’s activities, even though I am the person who did the work.

I was the first director of the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough Center on Professionalism at the University of South Carolina School of Law from April 1999 until August 2003. The mission of the Center is to enhance the professionalism of lawyers and judges by undertaking a broad range of initiatives directed at law students, lawyers, and judges.

During my directorship, the Center’s initiatives included publication of a pamphlet on professionalism for new students and a pamphlet on professionalism for graduating students, facilitating symposia issues of the South Carolina Law Review for four straight years, developing and presenting co-curricular programs on professionalism featuring practicing lawyers and judges for law students (especially first year law students), conducting a professionalism essay contest for our students, sponsoring an annual award for the clinical student who best exhibited qualities of professionalism, hanging in the law school’;s hallways a rotating series of posters that contain informational and inspirational statements by and about legal professionals, sponsoring visits by judges and academics, creating and supporting a student committee on professionalism that examined possible standards of professionalism for law students and produced an oath of professionalism that was administered by our chief justice for the first time in 2003 during our orientation program that includes expanded attention to professionalism.

The Center also participates in efforts to enhance professionalism outside the School of Law, including during my term as director, sponsorship of two national conferences on professionalism and multiple SC Bar CLE programs. The Center exchanges information with other organizations that are working to improve professionalism and it participates in and supports their activities.

The Center established and maintains a website devoted to professionalism (http://professionalism.law.sc.edu ) and a national professionalism list serve.

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Program History:

This specific information requested does not fit neatly with the Center’s activities. The Center was established in 1999 when a regional law firm based in Columbia, Nelson Mullins Riley &; Scarborough LLC, pledged a gift of one million dollars to endow our center. We spent a large part of the first year studying professionalism issues and initiatives that might help resolve them.

One of our first major initiatives was to organize and fund a national conference on professionalism, co-sponsored by the Keck Center on Legal Ethics and the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School. Enhancing the Professionalism of Lawyers: Can Commissions, Committees, and Centers Make a Difference? was held in Savannah, Georgia, in October, 2000. ABA President Martha Barnett delivered the keynote address. The Law Review devoted its spring 2001 issue to the proceedings of the conference and related articles. Since then, it has devoted one of its books each year to professionalism, including one that will be published in the spring of 2004. I worked closely with the Law Review on each issue, and the Center paid to have extra copies made and distributed extensively around the country to people and organizations identified with professionalism initiatives.

Also in 2000, we created the student committee on professionalism, and we received a grant from the Open Society Institute to create a national website devoted to professionalism. This led to two years of intensive work by me aided by law students and a computer science student and guided by a national advisory committee. The website went on-line in March 2002. A month later, we gave our first clinical program professionalism award ($500).

The Center participated in orientation for the first time in August 2002. I made remarks about professionalism, and students working for the Center organized a skit about professional conduct during law school. We also distributed a pamphlet on professionalism to all students. We followed this with a series of co-ordinated speakers programs on professionalism in the fall, “Mondays at One”, aimed at first year students, and presented more programs for students in the spring, “Wednesdays at Six”. Our first professionalism essay contest was conducted in the fall of 2002. In September, 2002, we held our second national conference, once again co-sponsored by the Keck Center at Stanford: Enhancing the Accountability of Lawyers for Unprofessional Conduct. It was held in Charleston, South Carolina. ABA President-Elect Dennis Archer delivered the keynote address.

In the spring of 2003, aided by the Young Lawyers Division of the SC Bar, we created a pamphlet on professionalism for new lawyers that we gave to our graduating students. In August, 2003, orientation was expanded to place more emphasis on professionalism as a result of advocacy by me and our student committee on professionalism.

As director, I attended many meetings about professionalism and regularly communicated with other people around the country about their professionalism initiatives. I served on the Professionalism Committee of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. I remain the Section’s liaison to the ABA Standing Committee on Professionalism.

The Center’s work is continuing under the direction of another senior member of the faculty, Rob Wilcox, who will maintain many of our programs and initiate others. Although I am no longer the director, I am overseeing the conversion of the professionalism website data into an new format, which I will follow with an extensive updating of the website.

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Confidential Items:

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Expanded Program Description (Optional):

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Supporting Materials:

I will mail copies of our professionalism pamphlets and national conference programs. The issues of the South Carolina Law Review devoted to professionalism are Vol. 52, no. 3 (spring 2001), Vol. 53, no. 3 (spring 2002), and Vol. 54, no. 4 (summer 2003).

The professionalism website is at http://professionalism.law.sc.edu .