As the legal profession evolves to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future, a new national project aims to prepare law students to better understand their roles and responsibilities as lawyers.
Professor Kendall Kerew with the Pluralizing Professional Identities research team, Charles I. Stone Professor of Law
Monte Mills, Professor Andrew King-Ries and principal investigator Professor Eduardo R.C. Capulong.
Georgia State University College of Law Professor Kendall Kerew will contribute her expertise to this effort to reshape how law students understand and develop their professional identities. Supported by a $250,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the initiative, “‘Pluralizing’ Professional Identity,” is led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s William S. Richardson School of Law and brings together faculty from several institutions, including the University of Montana, University of Washington and Georgia State.
The faculty will collaborate to develop case studies, host symposia, and facilitate workshops that engage students, faculty, and legal professionals in meaningful dialogue.
Professor Kerew directs Georgia State Law’s externship program and her research focuses on professional identity formation.
“I’m excited to work with colleagues from across the country who have engaged in important work examining the development of professional identity in law students and offering ideas for improvement,” said Kerew. “This grant will give us the opportunity to build on that work by identifying the multiple ways the traditional law school curriculum constrains the development of professional identity for law students, who as a group are becoming increasingly more diverse, and by creating curricular interventions that will center all students as emerging members of a profession with a duty to uphold the rule of law, protect democracy and remedy injustice.”
“‘Pluralizing’ Professional Identity” is a two-year project that will create educational resources and programming that explore the values, ethics and responsibilities that guide the legal profession in cooperation with the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards. The initiative will result in the publication of new educational materials and best practices, as well as public-facing events designed to extend the project’s impact to law schools across the country.
“We are proud that Professor Kerew will be part of this important national collaboration,” said Courtney Anderson, dean of Georgia State Law. “Her leadership in the areas of experiential education and professional identity formation makes her uniquely qualified to contribute to a project that aligns so closely with our commitment to preparing students for ethical careers in service of justice and the rule of law.”
“The law school curriculum needs to address the needs and experiences of all of our students,” said Professor Eduardo R.C. Capulong, the principal investigator of the grant in a press release from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. “And especially now, it needs to model lawyering practices that promote democracy and the rule of law.”
With generous support from the Mellon Foundation, the “‘Pluralizing’ Professional Identity” project emphasizes a belief that focusing on the development of professional identity through democratic lawyering will improve legal education and strengthen both the profession and the values it is meant to uphold.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there. Through grants, the Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.