Includes index.

Chapter 1. What is professional identity? -- Chapter 2. Professional identity and virtue ethics. -- Chapter 3. Competence as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 4. Fidelity to the client as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 5. Fidelity to the law as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 6. Public spiritedness as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 7. Civility as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 8. Practical wisdom as a professional virtue. -- Chapter 9. Professional identity and well-being.

"Becoming a lawyer is about much more than acquiring knowledge and technique. As law students learn the law and acquire some basic skills, they are also inevitably forming a deep sense of themselves in their new roles as lawyers. That sense of self__the student's nascent professional identity__needs to take a particular form if the students are to fulfill the public purposes of lawyers and find deep meaning and satisfaction in their work. In this book, Mercer Law professors Patrick Longan, Daisy Floyd, and Timothy Floyd combine what they have learned in many years of teaching and research concerning the lawyer's professional identity with lessons derived from legal ethics, moral psychology, and moral philosophy. They describe in depth the six virtues that every lawyer needs as part of his or her professional identity, and they explore both the obstacles to acquiring and deploying those virtues and strategies for overcoming those impediments. The result is a straightforward guide for law students on how to cultivate a professional identity that will allow them to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others and to flourish as individuals"-- Provided by publisher.