| This research began with Carol Gilligan's (1982) assumptions that moral concerns about both care and rights are expressed by mature adults facing real-life dilemmas. In addition, females tend to focus on care concerns and males tend to focus on rights concerns. The intent of this study was to find if this association between gender and moral orientation described the population of women and men who chose to begin law school, whether legal education changed the moral perspective of students, and in particular, whether legal education differentially affected the moral reasoning processes of women and men.;Upon entering Temple University School of Law, the class of 1992 was given a questionnaire of selected items from the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (Loevinger & Wessler, 1970). Subjects were a random sample of 100 females and 100 males. Their questionnaires were scored for moral orientation using the Manual for Rating Moral Orientations: The Justice Orientation, and the Manual for Rating Moral Orientations: The Care Orientation (Rogers, 1987). A subsample of 15 females and 15 males was randomly selected to receive the semi-structured Real Life Moral Conflict and Choice Interview. Interview data was interpreted using (Brown et al., 1988) Guide to Reading Narratives of Conflict and Choice. Both sources of data were readministered at the end of the first year.;At the beginning of the year, Sentence Completion Test data found females' care scores significantly higher than males and found males' rights scores significantly higher than females. Interview data showed a significant gender/moral orientation association, females aligned with care, males with rights. At the end of one year of law school, Sentence Completion Test data showed a significant time difference and a significant gender by time difference. Females showed a significant decrease in the number of care responses and a significant increase in rights responses. Interview data produced the same trend showing no significant association at the end of one year of law school between gender and moral orientation, females having shifted in the direction of a rights construction of moral dilemmas. |
