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This chapter by Jothie Rajah analyses the Situation Room Photograph to illustrate transnational law as drama.

In light of challenges to the liberal international order, Tom Ginsburg asks, what would international law look like in an increasingly authoritarian world?

In this article, Susan P. Shapiro examines the failures and successes of advanced directives in the American medical system in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By drawing on After the JD Project data, this article examines changes in career structures at corporate law firms, which shape elite legal careers.

Janice Nadler examines the portrayal of homicide victims in “The Wire” and the social and economic factors that contribute to their value in this article.

John Hagan and Holly Foster analyze the Affordable Care Act’s effectiveness in addressing the health issues of high-risk populations.

Ajay K. Mehrotra addresses critical questions about the promise and limits of fundamental tax reform in this article.

Stephen Daniels considers the history of law school accreditation, tuition, and accessibility that has led to the current business model of legal education in this book chapter.

Featuring Laura Beth Nielsen, this article shows how judges and laypeople make decisions about workplace accommodations for disabled workers, influenced by perceptions of the “deserving worker”.

This study, featuring Bob Nelson and Ronit Dinovitzer, examines self-reports of perceived discrimination in the legal workplace.

  • Articles

Perceiving Discrimination: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in the Legal Workplace

Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Meghan Dawe and Ioana Sendroiu
Learning and Practicing Law
June 2019

From Law & Social Inquiry 

Using quantitative and qualitative data from a large national sample of lawyers, we examine self-reports of perceived discrimination in the legal workplace. Across three waves of surveys, we find that persons of color, white women, and LGBTQ attorneys are far more likely to perceive they have been a target of discrimination than white men. These differences hold in multivariate models that control for social background, status in the profession and the work organization, and characteristics of the work organization. Qualitative comments describing these experiences reveal that lawyers of different races, genders, and sexual orientations are exposed to distinctive types of bias, that supervisors and clients are the most frequent sources of discriminatory treatment, and the often-overt character of perceived discrimination. These self-reports suggest that bias in the legal workplace is widespread and rooted in the same hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pervade society.