Today the hyper-enriching Peter Levine writes about “fit” between class and the labor market, noting how it’s not just that wealthy people have more money, but that the way they raise their kids makes those kids better candidates for white collar jobs. This phenomenon is likely most pronounced in the legal profession. If, as Levine says, the “field of white-collar work is saturated with norms and expectations,” the field of lawyer and judge work is supersaturated with them.

Levine wants to propose a solution, but he first makes it clear that the most radical response “would not be to reform educational institutions so that they better prepare all children for the white-collar workforce.” This line of get-them-in-there-by-assimilating-them thinking is exactly the one that the organized bar is in right now. In response to damning statistics on the number of racial and ethnic minorities* in the legal profession, the ABA struck a commission on the problem, which has decided the best way to solve this problem is to (A) tell law firms they ought to hire more minorities, (B) help out national associations of minority lawyers, (C) give out awards to minority lawyers, and (D) wait for the statistics to improve. The commission has been waiting twenty years, now.

Levine’s proposal is a whole lot more exciting and promising: “The most radical response would be to enlarge the supply of stable and rewarding jobs that embody different values and skills from those of the white-collar world.” In the legal profession, this would mean recognizing that there’s more to lawyering than the office-based, suit-wearing, paper-and-court-appearances kind of work that so many of my law school classmates are now off to. In fact, you can quickly bring up strong evidence that that kind of traditional lawyering isn’t the best way to help whole tens of millions of people.

(* I know that Levine says that he doesn’t think this “fit” issue is a race issue. But the ABA doesn’t have an entity working to improve the presence in the profession of people from low-income backgrounds (as far as I know). I expect that if it did, that commission we be doing more or less the same things as the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession.)