When David B. Wilkins '77 got tenure at the Law School last year, he thought it meant that he could move off of the fast track and spend more time "sitting on the porch eating bon-bons."

No such luck.

Wilkins, who has taught at the Law School since 1986, says he hardly has a free minute to spend alone with the life-size cardboard cutout of Michael Jackson that inhabits his office.

Wilkins teaches the first-year introductory Civil Procedure course, and supervises student teachers for "Introduction to Lawyering." He is also director of the Law School's Program on the Legal Profession, which is designed to study the practice of law in America and suggest possible reforms.

In addition, the scholar is working on a book tentatively titled Obligation, Professionalism and Race: Black Lawyers in Corporate Practice, and serving on the committee which is searching for a successor to former Law School Dean of Students Sarah E. Wald.

Wilkins, who heads the civil procedures arm of the American Association of Law Schools, is also a favorite among students, and is considered the bestdressed professor at the Law School--which, he says, "isn't hard to do."

As longtime friend Pound Professor of Law James Vorenberg '48 puts it, "[Wilkins] puts out sparks in a lot of different ways."

Vorenberg, who knew Wilkins when he was an undergraduate in Dunster House and later when he attended the Law School during Vorenberg's tenure as dean, describes Wilkins as "such a dynamic human being that he has an impact in all sorts of directions."

"He's regarded by students as one of the best teachers," Vorenberg says. "He's carved out a space for himself in the whole area of legal ethics and civil procedure."

Wilkins explains that his interest in legal ethics stems from the four years he spent working for a small law firm in Washington, D.C., before coming to Harvard.

The legal ethics scholar says that a combination of admiration for his father--who was a lawyer in Chicago--and too much television led him to envision himself as a trial lawyer, fearlessly cross-examining criminals and provoking panicked confessions from on-lookers.

"I went to the Perry Mason school of lawyering," he jokes. "I never thought I wanted to be a law professor."

After graduating from Harvard Law in 1980 and spending two years clerking, first for a second circuit court and then for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Wilkins took a job with a firm in D.C.

However, he recalls, he soon found that corporate practice was not to his liking.

"I really didn't like the level of adversarialness that prevailed in the world of litigation," Wilkins says. "I didn't like not having control of my time and my thoughts. When you're a lawyer, your thoughts are for hire.