Fordham Law Review (vol. 94, no. 4) has a new colloquium on the ABA’s Standard 303(b)(3)—promulgated in 2022—that requires law schools to “provide substantial opportunities to students for . . . the development of a professional identity.”
According to Matthew Diller’s Foreward, the colloquium’s ten essays “cover a lot of ground” but generally “suggest that the project of promoting a vision of professionalism that leads to more fulfilled and effective attorneys has a long way to go.” Contents and some excerpts, below the fold.
Matthew Diller, Foreword: The Professional Socialization of Lawyers, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1255 (2026):
Taken together, the [collquium’s] essays portray a system in which conformity to an oppressive, skewed dominant culture is inculcated early and maintained in both subtle and obvious ways, yielding a legal culture that serves society poorly. . . .
Although read as a whole, these essays might seem like a fatal indictment of the legal profession’s culture, the authors in this collection offer paths forward for law schools, students, lawyers, and the profession. . . .
Rebecca Aviel, All the King’s Lawyers, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1261 (2026):
What is it worth to a law firm to operate in a society where the executive is constrained by law? This Essay seeks to dislodge an unspoken supposition that such constraints are somehow irrelevant to firm self-interest. A regime of unrestrained presidential fiat would ultimately undermine the predictability on which investment decisions, and legal advice itself, depend. But it is difficult to calculate how much a firm can reward executive lawlessness without imperiling its own vitality or how to weigh the reputational costs that a firm incurs along the way. To describe [various] firms’ conduct [in reaching agreements with the Trump Administration in early 2025] as rational business decision-making begs a deeper question: what is in a large law firm’s self-interest during a period of authoritarian consolidation?
Raymond H. Brescia, Training to the Tech: Fostering the Ethical Adaptation to and Adoption of Emerging Technologies in the Practice of Law, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1279 (2026):
[T]he obligation to promote the effective and ethical adoption of new and emerging technologies could render existing modes of lawyer socialization obsolete—or at least incomplete—because approaches that privilege legal experience over technological knowledge will not serve this moment well. As a result, firms that follow path-dependent and traditional approaches to lawyer socialization and merely apply them to encourage—or discourage—the adoption of emerging technologies in the practice of law may actually hinder the effective incorporation of such technologies that could improve the delivery of legal services and expand access to justice.
Meghan Dawe & Ronit Dinovitzer, Lawyers’ Career Aspirations in Canada and the United States, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1297 (2026):
Our analysis [of two national cohort studies through the lens of Bordieu’s concept of habitus] reveals three key patterns that clarify how aspirational stratification operates among early career lawyers working in the private firm sector. First, partnership aspirations dominate the professional landscape for lawyers working in law firms in the United States and Canada. Second, gender and race are important for understanding aspirations: we find a gender divide in aspirations to equity partnership in both countries and tobusiness careers in Canada; Black and Asian lawyers report significantly lower partnership aspirations than White lawyers in the United States and significantly higher business aspirations in Canada. Third, educational pedigree produces a counterintuitive pattern: graduates of elite law schools express lower partnership aspirations than their peers from less prestigious institutions, suggesting elite credentials provide access to broader professional “imaginaries” rather than simply intensifying traditional ambitions. These findings demonstrate how professional socialization reproduces inequality through divergent ways of valuing and aspiring to professional futures.
Pilar Margarita Hernández Escontrías, Law’s Penal-Professional World Order, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1321 (2026):
The self-regulating bar is a form of punitive governance used by the state to control entry into and expulsion from the profession. State bars deploy the traditional violence of the state: surveillance, policing, and punishment. Informed by carceral logics and free from oversight, state bars can abuse their power. In this way, the legal profession—like the state—advances a penal world order.
Casey E. Faucon, Socializing the Rule 2.1 Lawyer-Advisor, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1339 (2026):
This Essay discusses the need to cultivate a dual identity for transactional lawyers [that is, as technical lawyer and holistic advisor] so that the continued embracement and development of their identities as both lawyers and advisors remain central, instead of at the periphery. This Essay uses [Model Rule of Professional Conduct] 2.1 [on “other considerations” in rendering advice] as an invitation to lawyers to develop this dual identity, even if it does not provide all the answers for how this professional socialization might occur. Despite the persuasive scholarship on the topic, it seems that the first step in changing the professional socialization of lawyers is convincing transactional lawyers that this dual identity is necessary for their profession and, more importantly, for society. After all, corporate and business institutions, the lawyers who advise them, and their systemic operations can affect almost every aspect of communities and societies that build on said corporations.
Verónica C. Gonzales, Winging It: Convergence, Convivencia, and Belonging of Latina Lawyers, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1357 (2026):
This Essay examines how Latina lawyers navigate professional socialization through racialized and gendered expectations of“professionalism” in legal workplaces. Drawing on CommunicationAccommodation Theory, LatCrit scholarship, and multimodal rhetoric “dress practice,” this Essay analyzes how legal institutions reward convergence toward dominant communication styles while policing culturally and gendered coded self-presentation, including practices like wearing winged eyeliner, as unprofessional. Through personal narrative and theoretical analysis, the Essay reveals how Latina attorneys face a double bind: converge and risk self-erasure or diverge and risk exclusion. This assimilationist model extracts identity and emotional costs that are disproportionately borne by Latinas, who comprise only 1 percent of law firm partners despite representing nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population. This Essay proposes convivencia (harmonious coexistence) as an alternative framework and advocates equity-centered reforms in legal institutions to work toward a profession that values excellence in all forms.
Luz E. Herrera, Chicana Professionalism: Embracing Greñas, Glitter & Boots, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1377 (2026):
The current political moment, where immigrant identity is scapegoated and academic freedom is threatened, requires an affirmation of personal identity, a recognition of personal struggle, and a celebration of resilience. This Essay embraces the ideas that professional identity development is temporal and that the current conceptualization of professionalism requires embarking on a reflection journey that addresses the dissonance between personal conscience and professional duty.
Jayanth K. Krishnan & Kunle Ajagbe, Building a Professionally Socialized Immigration Bar: A Comparative Case Study, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1395 (2026):
Nigeria faces urgent immigration challenges, but unfortunately, it has failed to develop a professionally socialized immigration bar to address these issues. While immigration legal work exists, particularly for high-net-worth investors and undocumented laborers, Nigerian lawyers have not formed a cohesive, specialized professional community around immigration law.
Drawing on theories of legal professional socialization, this Essay argues that formal education, mentorship, peer networks, and institutional pathways are essential to fostering specialization. Yet these elements are largely missing in Nigeria, where immigration law is marginalized both doctrinally and institutionally.
Katrina Lee, Law Firm Silence, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1415 (2026):
Law firm silence, and breaks in that silence, merit closer examination at the dawn of an era when law firms are targeted by the federal government. . . .
While grounded in the notion that pervasive law firm silence is harmful to the maintenance of a constitutional democracy, this Essay does not defend or apologize for large law firm silence or voice. Instead, it focuses on explaining the deep entrenchment of silence in the large law firm enterprise. This Essay describes forces that cultivate or favor law firm silence, rendering silence the default mode for law firms. These forces stem from business, ethical, and reputational imperatives. From explanation flows a suggestion that large law firms’ role in achieving social change can be impacted by even small and subtle changes in silence-cultivating forces. This Essay lives at the intersection of the silence of the law firm organization, on one hand, and the impacted plight of the individual law firm lawyer in choosing silence or voice, on the other.
Sarah J. Schendel, “No Further Discussion Necessary”: Compliance as Professionalism in Legal Education, 94 Fordham L. Rev. 1435 (2026)
This Essay argues that what law schools call professionalism is too often,in practice, the socialization of compliance. . . .
The consequences are threefold. First, students become estranged from their own moral instincts and values. Conditioned to seek extrinsic validation from authority, they learn to equate self-suppression with professionalism. This estrangement falls heaviest on students who are already marginalized in the profession, whose belonging depends on conformity to dominant normsof race and gender. Second, the profession itself suffers. Lawyers trained to equate ethics with rule following are less able to exercise the individual discretion that justice demands, viewing themselves primarily as technicians rather than discerning professionals. Finally, the potential democratic cost is grave. A profession that confuses compliance with integrity risks enabling many of the same abuses it was designed to prevent. History reminds us that authoritarian regimes rely not on lawlessness but on lawful compliance.
