Laws and legal institutions are often involved both when the private and the public make decisions with environmental consequences. Despite this, “little attention has been paid to the role of law schools and legal education in achieving sustainability” (Dernbach, 2011, p.226). Legal education implies socialization into a professional identity where specific values may be particularly prominent. Values are assumed to influence decisions and function as guiding principles by directing attention and perception in value-congruent directions (Schwartz, 1992). Research on the environmental impact of different values concludes that a distinction between altruistic, biospheric and egoistic value-dimensions is valid and useful (Stern & Dietz, 1994). Egoistic or self-enhancement values are related to power, wealth and authority while altruism and biospherism comprise self-transcendent values related to goals such as affiliation, social justice and respect for nature. A basic assumption is that values are entrenched during primary (Rokeach, 1973) and secondary (Hofstede, 2001) socialization, and that once acquired, they remain quite stable during the life span. There is however surprisingly little research examining exactly how values change (or not) as a function of age (Gouveia et al., 2015) or as a function of education. Joas (2000) explains commitment to a value as a combination of self-transcendence and self-formation following a transformative personal experience. Bardi and Goodwin (2011) suggest that values are stable by default but can change under major life transitions. Education has the potential to be a part of such major life transitions if the education includes transformative elements, ”peak moments of personal insight or intense change in thinking and perspective” (McEwen et al., 2010-11, p. 41).
The relevance in exploring whether the value orientation of Swedish law-students changes during education can be justified from different standpoints. First, to compare to findings from other Western countries indicating that self-transcending values are weakened and egoistic values strengthened among law-students during their training (Baron, 2013; Mertz, 2007; Sheldon & Krieger, 2007). Second, to meet the call from Holder (2013) on the need for a better understanding of how legal education and environmental education overlap and how to develop “the potential role for legal education as a vehicle for a socially-embedded style of environmental education, with the potential to combine forcefully ideas of environmental and social justice” (p. 544). Third, to consider that laws that are not ordinarily regarded as environmental laws often play a key role in shaping the environment (Nagle, 2010) which implies that prospective lawyers within a wide range of fields can be expected to hold future positions with potentially great environmental impact. Among major environmental problems caused by human actions the global warming is the ultimate global-commons problem. Implementation of global agreements regarding CO2-emissions means that adaptation requirements will trickle down to national and local levels where lawyers, representing different stakeholders, are expected to be engaged. Climate change being a bigger-than-self-problem (Chilton et al., 2012), self-transcendent values may accordingly be essential when coping with this problem. Research within social and environmental psychology during the last decades has produced a large and robust body of evidence showing that individuals with strong self-transcendence values are more motivated to engage in solving bigger-than-self problems while the opposite applies to persons with strong self-enhancement values (Holmes et al., 2011; Steg & De Groot, 2012).
In light of the foregoing the aim of this study is to answer two research questions: 1) do the value-orientations of Swedish law students, in regard to altruistic, biospheric and egoistic values, differ from value-orientations among other social science students at the beginning of their education and (2) do the law-students’ value-orientations change during their first year of education.
