David B. Wilkins

David B. Wilkins is a professor at Harvard Law School, where he serves as Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. He publishes The Practice, the Center's digital magazine on the changing legal profession. For four decades he has been among the most influential scholars studying how lawyers actually build careers, a subject he notes law schools have long neglected in favor of legal theory. He has written more than 80 articles on the legal profession and is the co-author or editor of five books, including one of the leading casebooks in the field and The Making of Lawyers' Careers, which reports the findings of the twenty-year After the JD study. He is best known for his research on diversity in the profession, including landmark studies of Harvard Law School's Black alumni, and for work examining how the economics of large law firms shape who advances within them. In 2007 he co-founded Harvard Law School's Executive Education Program, and in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.