Authenticity in Legal Practice

3 Credit Hours

This course centers on the process through which students form their professional identity - identifying, engaging, and incorporating both their personal values and personal narrative. Without a strong sense of your values, narrative, and identity, others will determine and define them for you. In this course, we will examine iterative processes, from: - the building blocks of values to how those values fit into professional responsibility to how those values play out in a range of professional roles and settings; and - the stories that make up our personal narrative to how those stories influence our professional identity to how stories are an integral part of lawyer-client relations and the practice of law. Students will use interview and narrative skills to develop and challenge their notions of what it means to be a lawyer, to be a part of the legal profession, and to progress on a new and challenging career path. After exploring identity and narrative theory, students will explore the experiences, career, and life of a lawyer (of student choosing with professor approval), then use that exploration as a reflective tool on their own career development.