The Making of Lawyers' Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

Nelson, Robert L.

Garth, Bryant G.

Michelson, Ethan

Dinovitzer, Ronit

Sterling, Joyce S.

Wilkins, David B.

Dawe, Meghan

Legal Education

University of Chicago Press

An unprecedented account of social stratification within the US legal profession. How do race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do professionals then navigate these parameters? The Making of Lawyers' Careers provides an unprecedented account of the last two decades of the legal profession in the US, offering a data-backed look at the structure of the profession and the inequalities that early-career lawyers face across race, gender, and class distinctions. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also interviewed more than two hundred lawyers and drew insights from their individual stories, contextualizing data with theory and close attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession. Their findings show that lawyers' careers both reflect and reproduce inequalities within society writ large. They also reveal how individuals exercise agency despite these constraints.

This new edition, a revision of the longest-running professional responsibility title, includes a new author and a new title that emphasizes the two distinctive features of the book. Completely redone by Kaufman and Wilkins with a multitude of new problems, text, and excerpted materials, it still features the popular problems method of the earlier editions. A whole new dimension, however, has been added throughout, and in an additional section that features recent empirical work on lawyers, it examines how large-scale economic, demographic, and institutional changes are likely to shape the norms of legal practice and the careers of lawyers in the twenty-first century. A teacher's manual is available.

Problems in Professional Responsibility for a Changing Profession

Kaufman, Andrew L.

Ethics & Professional Responsibility

Carolina Academic Press

New Suits: Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World

Sako, Mari

Lederer, Peter D.

Ferrer, Maria José Esteban

Stämpfli Verlag AG

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Books by Wilkins, David B.