ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on David Wilkins’s 1998 article ‘Fragmenting Professionalism: Racial identity and the ideology of bleached out lawyering’ (‘Fragmenting Professionalism’) in the International Journal of the Legal Profession as a starting point to think about identity, culture, and belonging within the contemporary legal profession. Wilkins’s work on the diverse legal profession has been a predominant pin cite for scholars for good reason. Wilkins wrote ‘Fragmenting Professionalism’ at the height of the professionalism project of the 1980s and 1990s, where legal ethicists and scholars were emphasizing the importance for lawyers to refrain ‘from allowing their personal moral or political commitments to “filter” or “screen” their professional obligations to give their clients unfettered access to all that the law ha[d] to offer’. This dominant conception of the lawyer has had many critics over the years, but its resilience has been rooted in a prefigurative assumption that the ideal lawyer was one that would transcend their personal selves.
