UC Berkeley

The empirical literature on U.S. legal education suggests that learning to “think like a lawyer” requires students to bifurcate personal values and the professional self. Legal scholars perennially debate whether this bifurcation results in an alienated and “bleached out” professionalism or a relatively benign sacrifice of personal preferences in favor of the client-centered principle of “neutral partisanship.” This dissertation brings these normative and empirical perspectives into conversation through an exploratory microdynamic study of lawyers’ professional identity formation at an elite law school. Drawing on 153 longitudinal interviews, a novel identity mapping method, and ethnographic observations, I examine how law students conceive of their emerging professional selves relative to other roles in their lives, how these conceptions change over the course of legal education, and how this empirical analysis may alter normative debates on professional socialization.