Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis

Self Cite

Through their professional education and training, new lawyers are generally encouraged to adopt a civic vision of professional identity. This article explores convergences and divergences in how new lawyers entering an increasingly globalized legal profession conceive of their civic roles in different national contexts. In particular, I draw on interviews and a cross-cultural identity-mapping method to examine the lived experiences of civic professionalism among corporate-lawyers-in-training in the United States and China. I found that professional identity formation in the US sample is largely marked by role distancing and a sense of constrained public-interest expression. In contrast, Chinese respondents generally identified strongly with their civic roles, while framing their public contributions in pragmatic, state-aligned terms. I conclude with a comparative analysis of young lawyers’ bottom-up efforts to expand their civic impact.

Section: Us Findings: Constrained Divided and Unstable Professionalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming Global Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Civic Professionalism

Bliss¹

2021

Self Cite

“…To understand these layered patterns of assimilation and belonging, we employ the theoretical framework extended by Erving Goffman (1963) and used since by other scholars in theorizing about marginal identities (e.g. Granfield 1991;Yoshino 2007;Bliss 2016). In his work on stigmatized identities, Goffman explains that individuals who possess traits that might differentiate them from mainstream "normals" (1963,5) are likely to employ a range of mechanisms to moderate their visibility (1963,(48)(49)(50)(51).…”

Section: Minority Experiences In Us Jd Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A NEW MINORITY? International JD Students in US Law Schools

Ballakrishnen

Silver²

2019

This Article reveals the significance of a new and growing minority group within US law schools—international students in the Juris Doctor (JD) program. While international students have received some attention in legal education scholarship, it mostly has been focused on their participation in the context of programs specially designed for this demographic (e.g. postgraduate programs like the LLM and SJD). Drawing from interview data with fifty-eight international JD students across seventeen graduating US law schools, our research reveals the rising importance of international students as actors within a more mainstream institutional context. In examining the ways these students navigate their law school environments, we find that although international status often impacts identity and participation, not all students encounter its impact similarly. Particularly, while some students use the identity to their advantage, others cannot escape negative implications, even with effort. This is consistent with other scholarship on minority students, and adds to a growing literature that uses their socialization experiences to better understand professional stratification. To unpack these different ways of “being international,” we borrow from Goffman’s theorization of stigma to suggest illustrative variations in the ways international students experience their environments. In doing so, we offer an introductory landscape to better understand this growing population and hope this enables new insights to theorize about other kinds of minority experience.

“…Americans likewise favor providing opportunity to individuals rather than group-based redistributive results (Kleugel and Smith 1986;Bobo and Kleugel 1993). For lawyers, including judges, socialization into liberal legality in law school and beyond (Schleef 2006;Bliss 2017) exacerbates these cognitive and normative tendencies. 4 Deference to managerialization of Title VII likewise reflects capitalism's market ideals, especially that of managerial and business prerogative.…”

Section: Can Managerialization and Legal Endogeneity Be Curtailed?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4. Law students also have available to them and may adopt notions of substantive justice, but liberal legality typically dominates law school socialization (Scheingold and Sarat 2014;Bliss 2017). opposition to aggressive regulatory enforcement of many types, from labor to environmental protection to occupational safety and health law (Stryker 1996).…”

Section: Can Managerialization and Legal Endogeneity Be Curtailed?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Economy andWorking Law

Stryker¹

2019

Lauren B. Edelman’s Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) offers an empirically supported theory of legal endogeneity, explaining how managerialized ideas of compliance with employment discrimination legislation diffuse in organizational fields and shape judicial doctrine. Managerialization and legal endogeneity explain how and why equality-promoting civil rights legislation may do little to reduce workplace inequalities. This essay places Edelman’s theory within a broader terrain of opportunities and limits of law for promoting egalitarian change. Managerialization is not always detrimental to enhancing workplace race and gender equality. However, typically reinforcing logics of market capitalism and liberal legality often make it so, while blocking reforms countering judicial deference to managerialized compliance.