Portraiture in the Legal Profession
The Practice
November/December 2020
What draws people to the law? Drawing on Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's ethnographic method of portraiture, this issue examines race, legacy, and professional identity in the legal profession.
November/December 2020
John Robinson Wilkins and the Resources of the Law
As the first Black law professor in the history of Berkeley Law School, this article chronicles the life and career of my uncle - John Robinson Wilkins. Like this issue of The Practice more generally, the article paints a portrait of an amazing individual in the law as well as, hopefully, yields wider insights on the power of personal narratives—of what this issue’s “Speaker’s Corner” guest Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot dubs “portraiture.”
America’s Missing Stories
We spoke with Julieanna Richardson, the founder and president of The HistoryMakers, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, to discuss the power of narratives and oral histories—and how Richardson, a trained lawyer herself, brought it all to life.
Barriers Beyond the Bar
As Specia notes, per the Bar Standards Board, women make up just 38 percent of all U.K. barristers and 16 percent of the most senior barristers. For Black barristers, those figures are 3.2 percent and 1.1 percent, respectively.
Following in Their Footsteps
Does having a lawyer as a parent impact individuals’ decisions to become lawyers themselves? What does empirical research reveal about the role of occupational inheritance in the legal profession? And, second, how is that occupational inheritance complicated by factors such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status?
Revealing the Invisible
Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, chronicles the incredible career of his grandmother, Eunice Carter, a Black woman prosecutor in New York City at a time when very few lawyers in the country were either Black or women in his latest published book, "Invisible."
Portrait of an Artist
A conversation with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Emily Hargroves Fisher Research Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
