Book Launch – The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession

Join the Center on the Legal Profession for a Book Launch of The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

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.

Speakers include:

• David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School
• Robert Nelson, Professor of Sociology and MacCrate Research Chair at the American Bar Foundation
• Ronit Dinovitzer, Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
• Bryant Garth, Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, UCI Law
• Meghan Dawe, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School

Please note that lunch will be served at 12:15 pm; the programming will begin at 12:30 pm.