Moral Character: Making Sense of the Experiences of Bar Applicants with Criminal Records

While problems of basic survival are understandably acute, and therefore deserving of a central place in socio-legal scholarship, it is also important to learn how criminal histories operate in professional realms in which they are perceived as more unusual and aberrant. Accordingly, this paper seeks to expand the framework of re-entry and desistance to discuss admission barriers to an elite, selective profession — the legal profession. It seeks to understand, and systematize, the experiences of people with criminal records who apply for admission to the Bar; how they make sense of their past and their present; how they experience the moral character determination process; and how their histories and the moral character process shapes their professional paths and aspirations. The project corresponds with bodies of literature about prisoner re-entry, life-course criminology and desistance, sociology of the professions, and socio- psychological writings about remorse, stigma, and redemption of spoiled identities.