"It seems to me that much of the way we conduct litigation today is wasteful and ultimately destructive of the ideals we're supposed to be upholding," he continues.

Wilkins says that many practicing lawyers are aware of and dissatisfied with the level of unnecessary contention litigation involves, and the dynamic of "fighting over things that everyone knows will be resolved." However, he says, most are too insulated in their profession to be able to critique the situation.

So he turned to academia, as Vorenberg had been urging him to do since his Law School years, in search of "an environment where you have the freedom to think about these difficult ideas."

And although the environment at the Law School is certainly not free of contention, Wilkins points out that while in legal practice differences of opinion are divisive, "we in the legal academy have the luxury, if we choose, to make our differences our strengths."

Although Wilkins shies away from addressing the issue of last year's controversy over faculty diversity, he says that the discussions have had a positive effect of forcing people to think about the issue.

Wilkins was tenured in the midst of student protests and sit-ins over the lack of diversity in Law School faculty. In addition, Derrick A. Bell Jr., former Weld professor of law, refused the return the Harvard after a two-year leave of absence to protest the school's hiring practices.

"The goal of having a diverse faculty is very important," he says. "In my judgment Harvard has made a lot of progress on the issue of diversity, but there's a lot more progress to be made."

But he adds that "it's always true that whatever's going on at Harvard is magnified in the press."

Throughout his career at Harvard, Wilkins sees his role as questioning the adversarial view of the legal profession and positing a different paradigm, one that will be theoretically satisfying and practically attainable.

For example, he points to the stereotype of the law school student as an uptight, overworked, angstridden creature as symptomatic of doubts among scholars of law "about the social utility and moral worthiness of the legal profession."

Wilkins observes that the Law School, like any entrenched institution, has been slow to respond to the new scholarship on legal ethics which has developed over the past decade.

"Much of the way we train lawyers to think about their jobs encourages a kind of hyper-adversarial view of their jobs," he says. "Harvard is steeped in the tradition of the legal profession which emphasizes loyalty to the client above all other values."

But Wilkins adds that he and other scholars in his field no longer have to defend the study of legal ethics, in part because events like the Rodney King trial demonstrate clearly that many practicing lawyers are not "good."

"It is clear that the issues are out there, but there is still disagreement" about the degree to which they should be privileged over other, more traditional fields of law, he says.

Wilkins addresses legal ethics in both of the courses he teaches--"Civil Procedure" and "Introduction to Lawyering"--as well as in his role as director of the Program on the Legal Profession.