Law review teaches students ethics

   About 50 law students attended Chapman Law Review's 40th anniversary of Watergate last Thursday and Friday to learn about legal ethics from men directly involved in the scandal.  

   Chapman law professor Ronald Rotunda pitched the event idea last summer. Rotunda, who was Assistant Majority Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee during the scandal, has remained friends with speakers Scott Armstrong, Alexander Butterfield and John Dean and asked them to speak as a part of the panel.

   "It's too easy to say that these are just evil men who did an evil thing. But they're just like us," Rotunda said. "We don't know what we would do if put under similar pressure. We like to think we wouldn't do that, but we don't know."

   Armstrong, a former Washington Post reporter, covered Watergate and was an investigator on the Senate Watergate Committee. Butterfield is best known for exposing the Nixon administration's request to have the Oval Office bugged. Dean is a former Nixon White House Counsel member who pled guilty to obstruction of justice.

   Chris Hossellman, a second-year Chapman law student, said he enjoyed hearing about the famous scandal straight from the sources involved.

   "It's to commemorate, not celebrate," Hossellman said. "It's important because if you don't think about it, you'll forget it and it'll happen again. We need it fresh in our memory."

   Events at the symposium included a keynote speech by Dean and a panel with four law professors from around the country. The panel spoke about how the ethical implications of Watergate have shaped today's law practices, such as the requirement for every law student to take an ethics class.

   However, most of the panels and questions were aimed at Dean, seeking his expertise and personal account of the Watergate scandal. Dean contrasted what was learned in Watergate to Fox News and President George W. Bush's administration.

   After Watergate, the government set up a system to ward off another political disaster by requiring government officials to disclose financial information and changes in campaign finances, Dean said.

   "All those things that were created to prevent another Watergate have all but vanished," he said.

   During the first panel, Dean moderated a discussion between Butterfield and Armstrong as they walked through all the major events of Watergate, focusing on Butterfield's startling knowledge of the tapes.

   "I said that if they ask me a direct question, I'd have to answer," Butterfield said. "And I knew it was the end of my career, at least in Washington."

Check out excerpts from Taylor Johnson's Q&A with John Dean here.