No Such Luck

When David B. Wilkins '77 got tenure at the Law School last year, he thought it meant that he could move off of the fast track and spend more time "sitting on the porch eating bon-bons."

No such luck.

Wilkins, who has taught at the Law School since 1986, says he hardly has a free minute to spend alone with the life-size cardboard cutout of Michael Jackson that inhabits his office.

Wilkins teaches the first-year introductory Civil Procedure course, and supervises student teachers for "Introduction to Lawyering." He is also director of the Law School's Program on the Legal Profession, which is designed to study the practice of law in America and suggest possible reforms.

In addition, the scholar is working on a book tentatively titled Obligation, Professionalism and Race: Black Lawyers in Corporate Practice, and serving on the committee which is searching for a successor to former Law School Dean of Students Sarah E. Wald.

Wilkins, who heads the civil procedures arm of the American Association of Law Schools, is also a favorite among students, and is considered the bestdressed professor at the Law School--which, he says, "isn't hard to do."

As longtime friend Pound Professor of Law James Vorenberg '48 puts it, "[Wilkins] puts out sparks in a lot of different ways."

Vorenberg, who knew Wilkins when he was an undergraduate in Dunster House and later when he attended the Law School during Vorenberg's tenure as dean, describes Wilkins as "such a dynamic human being that he has an impact in all sorts of directions."

"He's regarded by students as one of the best teachers," Vorenberg says. "He's carved out a space for himself in the whole area of legal ethics and civil procedure."

Wilkins explains that his interest in legal ethics stems from the four years he spent working for a small law firm in Washington, D.C., before coming to Harvard.

The legal ethics scholar says that a combination of admiration for his father--who was a lawyer in Chicago--and too much television led him to envision himself as a trial lawyer, fearlessly cross-examining criminals and provoking panicked confessions from on-lookers.

"I went to the Perry Mason school of lawyering," he jokes. "I never thought I wanted to be a law professor."

After graduating from Harvard Law in 1980 and spending two years clerking, first for a second circuit court and then for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Wilkins took a job with a firm in D.C.

However, he recalls, he soon found that corporate practice was not to his liking.

"I really didn't like the level of adversarialness that prevailed in the world of litigation," Wilkins says. "I didn't like not having control of my time and my thoughts. When you're a lawyer, your thoughts are for hire.

"It seems to me that much of the way we conduct litigation today is wasteful and ultimately destructive of the ideals we're supposed to be upholding," he continues.

Wilkins says that many practicing lawyers are aware of and dissatisfied with the level of unnecessary contention litigation involves, and the dynamic of "fighting over things that everyone knows will be resolved." However, he says, most are too insulated in their profession to be able to critique the situation.

So he turned to academia, as Vorenberg had been urging him to do since his Law School years, in search of "an environment where you have the freedom to think about these difficult ideas."

And although the environment at the Law School is certainly not free of contention, Wilkins points out that while in legal practice differences of opinion are divisive, "we in the legal academy have the luxury, if we choose, to make our differences our strengths."

Although Wilkins shies away from addressing the issue of last year's controversy over faculty diversity, he says that the discussions have had a positive effect of forcing people to think about the issue.

Wilkins was tenured in the midst of student protests and sit-ins over the lack of diversity in Law School faculty. In addition, Derrick A. Bell Jr., former Weld professor of law, refused the return the Harvard after a two-year leave of absence to protest the school's hiring practices.

"The goal of having a diverse faculty is very important," he says. "In my judgment Harvard has made a lot of progress on the issue of diversity, but there's a lot more progress to be made."

But he adds that "it's always true that whatever's going on at Harvard is magnified in the press."

Throughout his career at Harvard, Wilkins sees his role as questioning the adversarial view of the legal profession and positing a different paradigm, one that will be theoretically satisfying and practically attainable.

For example, he points to the stereotype of the law school student as an uptight, overworked, angstridden creature as symptomatic of doubts among scholars of law "about the social utility and moral worthiness of the legal profession."

Wilkins observes that the Law School, like any entrenched institution, has been slow to respond to the new scholarship on legal ethics which has developed over the past decade.

"Much of the way we train lawyers to think about their jobs encourages a kind of hyper-adversarial view of their jobs," he says. "Harvard is steeped in the tradition of the legal profession which emphasizes loyalty to the client above all other values."

But Wilkins adds that he and other scholars in his field no longer have to defend the study of legal ethics, in part because events like the Rodney King trial demonstrate clearly that many practicing lawyers are not "good."

"It is clear that the issues are out there, but there is still disagreement" about the degree to which they should be privileged over other, more traditional fields of law, he says.

Wilkins addresses legal ethics in both of the courses he teaches--"Civil Procedure" and "Introduction to Lawyering"--as well as in his role as director of the Program on the Legal Profession.

The program, which Wilkins has headed since last spring, was formed in 1981 with a $275,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to encourage innovative approaches to teaching legal ethics, which bridge the gap between the academy and the profession.

One of its principle methods is to invite legal practitioners to the Law School, either for panels or to be a scholar in residence.

Wilkins also meets with faculty from the Business, Kennedy and Medical Schools to develop courses and learning experiences that could be helpful for future lawyers. "It's a very real danger that things we teach students here at the Law School will not match up to what they find in the legal profession," he says.

Through the Program on the Legal Profession, Wilkins has also been organizing studies of the practice for the purpose of understanding the ways in which law is actually practiced. "We have to teach [the students] about that's actually realistic and practical," he says.

Wilkins says that he is not troubled by the conflict between research and teaching that plagues some professors. In fact, he claims that teaching improves the quality of his research, and vice versa.

"Part of the reason I like teaching at the Law School is that teaching is taken very seriously," he says.

According to Professor of Law Martha L. Minow, who has known Wilkins since they clerked together for Marshall, teaching is one of Wilkins' principle assets.

"David is one of the Law School's most dynamic teachers and he brings new insight into the subject of professional ethics," she says. "He's extremely gifted in communicating across the potential gulf between theory and practice and between different schools of legal thought."

Wilkins' says his devotion to the study of legal ethics and the problems of lawyering is an affirmation of the possibility of evolution and change in that realm--witness the fact that only a decade ago legal ethics was not a respected field of scholarship.

He asserts, "I still firmly believe that a noble life can be lived as a lawyer."