Sustaining the Integrated Self: Pushing Back Against Thin Professional Identity in Law School

• In Event: 082 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 17. Identity

Abstract

According to a substantial body of empirical research, students who enter law school with a professed commitment to cause-lawyering careers are highly likely to abandon those career goals during the course of legal education, instead pursuing positions in private law firms. In addition to economic factors, scholars have examined how legal pedagogy socializes students to adopt the standard conception of the lawyer role (which is often labeled “thin professional identity,” “bleached out professionalism,” or “neutral partisanship”). The standard conception is consistent with conventional lawyering, but entirely opposed to the moral and political foundations of cause lawyering. This article, following the recent inquiry by Scheingold and Sarat, asks how students maintain their commitments to cause lawyering in spite of the prevailing forces pushing them toward thin professional identity and private law firms. The existing literature points to three mechanisms that sustain cause lawyering career commitment: a public-interest subculture within law schools, clinical education, and students’ initial cynicism about law (shielding them from disillusionment). This article presents an identity-level analysis of these mechanisms. Through longitudinal interviews with law students and new lawyers, ethnographic observations of the law-firm hiring programs, and identity mapping, I find that aspiring cause lawyers in my sample indeed experience more integrated (or “thick”) conceptions of professional identities when compared to other students, but are more alienated in their roles as law students. Analogizing to Snow and Anderson’s study of deviant identity construction, I examine how aspiring cause lawyers use “identity work” to sustain integrated professional self-concepts.

Author

• John Bliss, University of California-Berkeley