The program, which Wilkins has headed since last spring, was formed in 1981 with a $275,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to encourage innovative approaches to teaching legal ethics, which bridge the gap between the academy and the profession.
One of its principle methods is to invite legal practitioners to the Law School, either for panels or to be a scholar in residence.
Wilkins also meets with faculty from the Business, Kennedy and Medical Schools to develop courses and learning experiences that could be helpful for future lawyers. "It's a very real danger that things we teach students here at the Law School will not match up to what they find in the legal profession," he says.
Through the Program on the Legal Profession, Wilkins has also been organizing studies of the practice for the purpose of understanding the ways in which law is actually practiced. "We have to teach [the students] about that's actually realistic and practical," he says.
Wilkins says that he is not troubled by the conflict between research and teaching that plagues some professors. In fact, he claims that teaching improves the quality of his research, and vice versa.
"Part of the reason I like teaching at the Law School is that teaching is taken very seriously," he says.
According to Professor of Law Martha L. Minow, who has known Wilkins since they clerked together for Marshall, teaching is one of Wilkins' principle assets.
"David is one of the Law School's most dynamic teachers and he brings new insight into the subject of professional ethics," she says. "He's extremely gifted in communicating across the potential gulf between theory and practice and between different schools of legal thought."
Wilkins' says his devotion to the study of legal ethics and the problems of lawyering is an affirmation of the possibility of evolution and change in that realm--witness the fact that only a decade ago legal ethics was not a respected field of scholarship.
He asserts, "I still firmly believe that a noble life can be lived as a lawyer."