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Tales of Diversity: Lawyers’ Narratives of Racial Equity in Private Firms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

John M. Conley
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Abstract

This article reports on what an interview study of the legal profession has revealed about diversity in private law firms. The study can be fairly described as an accidental research project—more specifically, a professional responsibility course that turned into an empirical study of the legal profession. After ten years of teaching this course, I have accumulated, almost as a byproduct, a significant corpus of qualitative data about lawyers’ lives, the organizations in which they practice, and the legal profession as a whole. The late Rodney Dangerfield said, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” An apt description of this study might be, “I went to class and a research project broke out.”

Type
Symposium: New Legal Realism
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Fall 2006 , pp. 831 - 853
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2006 

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