Tolu Lawal and Al Brooks

Volume 27.1 (download PDF)

Abstract

The Character and Fitness process is the last major institutional hurdle that aspiring attorneys must overcome to gain licensure to the legal profession. A process held out to determine “moral” character, the Character and Fitness often goes uninterrogated, instead flattened into just a quotidian and inconvenient aspect of the profession’s admission procedures. However, the normalization of both the process and existence of the Character and Fitness obscures the reality that this unscientific process neither has particularized, inherent value to the profession nor is an accurate tool of determining the moral or ethical principles of potential attorneys. Instead, the advocacy of racial justice organizers and the scholarship of critical legal theorists in recent years have exposed the true nature of the Character and Fitness as a tool of exclusion, which molds the legal field and law in the White man’s image.