What the Faculty Lacks: Social Inequalities Among Law Students and Their Implications

In modern societies, legal professions have been associated with relatively high status, income and power. Until recently, the legal profession in Turkey both represented public power and constituted an advantaged elite. However, with the expansion of legal education, the stratification of those who join the profession is relatively recent. The opening of a large number of new law faculties in Turkey in the last 20 years has brought hierarchies such as public-private and old-new among faculties. The transformation of legal education into a heterogeneous field changes the meaning of the law degree, which has long provided high social position in Turkey. Based on a quantitative survey on a representative sample of students from 9 different law faculties, this study investigates how the field of legal education sets the stage for gender and class differences and how the former reproduces the latter. The research focuses on students from relatively low social backgrounds in faculties of different prestige. How do the professional skills, predispositions and forms of capital that law schools are expected to provide to future professionals differ? In pursuit of this question, the findings reveal that social stratification seeps through the cracks of newly observed stratification in legal education, and that inequalities in gender, class and cultural capital that students bring with them from their social backgrounds are transmitted to professional pathways. Most importantly, the fact that faculties lag behind the specific skills and attainments required by the professional labor market affects disadvantaged students the most. However, students' attempts and orientations to compensate for this situation develop independently of the curriculum and instruction at the faculty.