Publication Date

2017

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

Sturm College of Law

Keywords

Professional identity, Legal education, Empirical legal studies, Law and society

Abstract

In the terms of Erving Goffman’s classic role distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self-construction. This article takes an exploratory microdynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. I find that over the course of their legal education students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public-interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. I conclude with normative and theoretical implications.

Publication Statement

This article has been published in a revised form in Law and Social Inquiry, as John Bliss, Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis, 42 Law & Soc. Inquiry 855 (2017), available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inquiry/article/abs/divided-selves-professional-role-distancing-among-law-students-and-new-lawyers-in-a-period-of-market-crisis/705DAD080891B98AE3D4B2DEE7DA5AC8. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use.

Rights Holder

John Bliss

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

53 pgs

File Size

1.8 MB

Publication Title

Law & Social Inquiry

Volume

42

First Page

1

Last Page

52

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