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Becoming Global Lawyers? A Comparative Study Of Civic Professionalism, John Bliss

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Through their professional education and training, new lawyers are generally encouraged to adopt a civic vision of professional identity. This article explores convergences and diverges in how new lawyers entering an increasingly globalized legal profession conceive of their civic roles in different national contexts. In particular, I examine corporate lawyers-in-training in the U.S. and China, drawing on interviews and a cross-cultural identity mapping method to compare their accounts of the lived experiences of civic professionalism. I find that professional identity formation in the U.S. sample is largely marked by role distancing and a sense of constrained public-interest expression. In contrast, …