Not a Pretty Picture: Race, Gender, and Inequality in the Legal Profession and Legal Education

Responding to renewed interest in law school as a path to a career “to do well and do good,” this essay examines Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe, and Michelson’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers and its account of inequality and opportunity in the American legal profession. Based on a 20-year study of more than 2,000 lawyers, the book traces how credentials, race, gender, class, and law school selectivity profoundly shape career trajectories. The essay situates those findings within the divide in private practice between corporate practice and people law and interrogates the professional ideology—rooted in the lawyer’s traditional role in the American adversarial system and reinforced by the required three-year JD—that binds these different and unequal hemispheres into a single profession. The essay then considers what these findings mean for legal education, especially elite law schools’ long-standing economic reliance on sending graduates to Big Law, in light of corporate firms’ increasingly tarnished reputation and the possible impact of AI adoption on associate hiring.