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Developing a Professional Identity: Lessons For Women, BIPOC, and First-Generation Law Students From the Canaries in the Coalmines
This Article explores the concept of professional identity formation in the law, particularly as it pertains to women and lawyers of color. The topic of professional identity formation is an understudied area in legal education, despite the ABA’s new Standard 303(b)(3), which requires law schools to provide substantial opportunities for the development of professional identity. In the legal field, professional identity is often conflated with professionalism, which leads to confusion about how law schools should best prepare their students for their professional lives, and fails to fully equip students to join the profession. Studies from other professions have shown that professional identity is the development of an identity whereby, the newcomer to the profession is adopted into and successfully incorporates the values of the profession, merging the new professional identity with their existing personal identity. Professional identities are most effectively fostered through joining communities of practice, where newcomers are mentored and welcomed into the professional culture. The Author argues that because the legal profession in private firms is still primarily white and male dominated, women, lawyers of color, and first generation lawyers do not always have access to the kind of mentorship, supportive community, and positive narratives that are necessary to foster a strong professional identity. While efforts have been made to foster diversity and inclusion in law firms, these have still fallen short. Thus, even though women, students of color, and first generation students might have positive experiences in law schools, these experiences are not necessarily replicated in firms. The Article goes on to suggest that this failure to fully incorporate these groups into a supportive community of practice in law firms, and the subsequent failure to foster and promote strong professional identities, may be one reason why women and lawyers of color leave the profession at far higher rates than white men.Rethinking Crime and Punishment: Women Who Kill Their Abusers in South Africa
The battered women’s movement in the United States was galvanized in the 1970s and ushered in a paradigm shift in how we understand domestic violence. For women who kill their abusers, the movement attempted to incorporate their lived experiences of domestic violence into legal doctrine. Decades later, the battered women’s movement has generated criticisms such as stereotyping women, failing to take an intersectional lens, and over-reliance on the carceral system. These lessons from feminists in the United States present cautionary tales for other contexts, especially for unequal societies impacted by domestic violence, crime, and mass incarceration. Prompted by personal experiences inspecting prisons across post-apartheid South Africa, I explore why women in South Africa resort to killing their abusers and why these women end up incarcerated with lengthy sentences. I engage with how the law responds–and ought to respond–to women who kill their abusers. After outlining lessons from the battered women’s movement in the United States, I concentrate on South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, with a particular focus on how the government instituted legal reforms to tackle violence against women. I explore the transitional period, noting that the post-apartheid government retreated from progressive forms of punishment, such as correctional supervision, and relapsed to punitive forms of punishment by establishing the mandatory minimum sentencing regime. I show how South Africa’s over-reliance on the carceral system, inspired by the United States’ tough-on-crime zeitgeist, inadvertently extends to women who kill their abusers. After acknowledging empirical gaps in data and uncovering a social movement, I critically analyze various cases involving women who kill their abusers in anticipation of, or after experiencing, cycles of abuse. I make three key findings: first, there is a lacuna in the criminal law regarding defenses for women who kill their abusers; second, no sentencing norms have been established; third, beyond legal doctrine, practical barriers hinder women’s access to the legal system. I argue that filling defense lacunas, establishing sentencing norms, and rectifying social barriers to access legal assistance are necessary, but not sufficient. I contend that the retributive criminal justice system is not tailored to deal with women who kill their abusers and propose, through a social justice lens, restorative and transformative justice mechanisms to hold women accountable. This paper lays the ground for a constructive dialogue for feminists in post-apartheid South Africa to engage with those in the United States and sets an agenda for further research, reform, and activism.Blog
A Modest Defense of Privacy
The story of the conservative backlash that Roe v. Wade triggered is well known. Less familiar is the pro-choice criticism that the decision elicited. In truth, even among liberals and feminists, the Supreme Court’s decision to ground the right to abortion in a constitutional “right of privacy”…“Pieces of a Woman,” COVID-19, and the Elusiveness of a Good Birth in the United States
This blog post contains mild spoilers for the film “Pieces of a Woman.” In the Netflix original film “Pieces of a Woman,” the protagonist, Martha copes with the aftermath of a disastrous home birth. While the movie is striking in its acting and its dramatization of a real-life experience of…Consenting to Unwanted Sex: A Sociolegal Perspective
This writing is adapted from a comprehensive empirical research study entitled “Power, agency, and emotion work: American college women’s reflections on their heterosexual lives,” as part of a PhD program at the University of Edinburgh Law School. “What if I say no to him and he gets really mad? What…
