Multicultural Lawyering: Teaching Psychology to Develop Cultural Self-Awareness

Overview

Multicultural lawyering training should begin with the lawyer's self-analysis of his/her culture and its influences on the lawyer. The article offers a framework for learning cultural self-awareness, starting with the teaching of cognitive and social psychology, including an understanding of the unconscious mechanisms by which every person categorizes others and the use every person makes of these categories as s/he encounters culturally different persons. It also provides real-life examples of how unconscious categorization affects behavior and how cultural self-awareness can enable more accurate, client-centered lawyering.

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