Finding the Lawyer Identity
The Practice
May/June 2018
How do students decide what to do after law school? In this issue, we explore the tension between public and private law and how students navigate careers between them.
May/June 2018
Drifting Law Students
Many incoming law students express preferences for nonprofit and government jobs but then experience a “public-interest drift” during law school, whereby they instead decide to pursue positions in private law firms. This phenomenon has increasingly presented an empirical puzzle. This article presents a systematic qualitative look at the public-interest drift process examining the stories behind students' evolving career orientations.
Mosaics of Lawyer Identities
How do corporate lawyers view their professional identity a decade into their career? How do lawyers who went to law school intending to go into public interest but “zagged” into a large firm view their identity? Are the professional identities of seasoned public-interest lawyers as centralized and integrated with their personal identities as the law school research suggests?
Public Interest in the Private Sector
Some law students view a stark divide between careers in the private sector and careers in the public-interest sector—a dichotomization that often produces intense anxieties about law students’ own professional identities as lawyers. This article expands on how the professional identity of lawyers minds the purported gap between “private” and “public interest” careers by adding an institutional perspective.
The Places You'll Go
There is no question that lawyers are increasingly moving between jobs, which takes them in and out of different practice settings. Beyond that, however, it is not clear whether all this movement is necessarily channeling lawyers from one specific setting to another—for instance, from large law firms to public-interest organizations or vice versa. One thing that is clear is that the majority of lawyers enter the industry through private practice.
Rethinking the First-Year Curriculum
Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. He joined John Bliss, a fellow at the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on professional identity formation and the role of law schools in preparing students for their careers as lawyers.
Journey through the Legal Profession
James J. Sandman is president of the Legal Services Corporation, the United States’ largest funder of civil legal aid programs. Sandman recently sat down with David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a one-on-one conversation on professional-identity formation across a career and across the legal profession.
