Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues in Counseling, 7th Edition

We set out to write a text on ethics, law, and professional issues in counseling that would provide basic information for graduate students in these areas and would offer sound practical advice for counseling practitioners. From 1997 to 2006, we were both professors in the counseling graduate program at the University of New Orleans. Ted Remley is an attorney with several years of legal experience and also has been a school and community college counselor. Barbara Herlihy has worked as a school counselor and a licensed professional counselor in private practice and community agency settings. She currently is a counselor educator with special interests in counselor ethics and social justice. It was through these workshops that the idea for this text was born. The counselors who attended our workshops had much in common, although they practiced in a variety of settings with diverse clientele. They shared a deep and abiding commitment to the welfare of their clients, a desire to stay current with the ethical standards of their profession, and a need to feel competent in dealing with legal issues that arose in their work. At the same time, they sometimes felt overwhelmed by the complex and conflicting demands of situations they encountered. They frequently had difficulty distinguishing between legal and ethical issues. As we worked together in our presentations to these counselors, we found that we very rarely disagreed with each other, but we did bring differing perspectives. Barbara’s ethics orientation led her to focus on client welfare and to emphasize protecting the client. Ted’s legal orientation helped us to consider. We believe both perspectives are important. Because both of us regularly teach graduate courses in professional orientation and ethics, we found ourselves discussing the need for a text written specifically for counselors that would address ethical, legal, and professional issues. Thus, out of our backgrounds and shared interests was conceived a text that is unique in that it approaches each professional issue in counseling from both an ethical perspective and a legal viewpoint. We believe you will find this integrated approach particularly helpful as you grapple with the complexities inherent in the work of the counselor. We also believe that the best learning is active rather than passive, and personalized rather than abstract. We hope that you will actively discuss and even argue about the issues that are raised throughout the text and that you will work to develop your own personal stance on these issues”

“We are pleased that this text is now in its seventh edition and has been adopted for master’s and doctoral courses in ethics in so many counseling graduate programs throughout the United States and abroad. Faculty members and students who have used this text in their teaching and learning have told us they find it to be comprehensive, rich with examples, and written in a style that makes complex material accessible.We think you will find it useful to know something about us, the co-authors, and how we came to write this text. Before we became colleagues at the same institution, we worked together over many years, co-authoring articles and presenting numerous workshops on law and ethics in counseling.