Ronit Dinovitzer

Ronit Dinovitzer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where she is cross appointed to the Institute for Management and Innovation (IMI). She is also a Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where she is Co-Director of the Research Group on Legal Diversity, and Affiliated Faculty in Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession. She has served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ronit recently delivered the Annual Lecture on the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, focusing on issues of diversity and inequality in the legal profession. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Toronto.

Ronit is a sociologist of the professions. Through her research on the legal profession, Ronit draws together analyses of the professions with research in social policy, including the social organization of lawyers, the context of labor markets, and the role of diversity in professional careers. She has pursued this work through her involvement with the After the JD project, the first national longitudinal study of law graduates in the US, and the Law and Beyond Study, the first national study of law graduates in Canada. Ronit’s work also attends to the role of ethics within professional practice. In current research, she is studying the role of ethical decision-making and professional autonomy, through a qualitative project on the ways in which corporate lawyers interact with their clients.