About

Carole Silver is Professor of Global Law & Practice at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. She is an expert in legal education and the legal profession, including in the global context. Through empirical research, she examines issues related to equity, diversity, and global forces within the legal profession and legal education. Silver has held academic positions at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and Northwestern University Law School, where she has also served as Senior Lecturer. Her professional background includes practicing corporate and securities law at Sidley & Austin and clerking for Judge Jesse Eschbach of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She has served as a Commission member of the American Bar Association’s Ethics 20/20 Commission and as Chair of the Standing Committee on International Trade in Legal Services for the ABA. At Northwestern, she teaches courses such as Business Associations, The Legal Profession: Careers of Law Graduates, and Globalization and the Legal Profession, among others.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Engineering ethics
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Law and economics
• Finance
• Business

Selected publications

• USA (regulation of legal education)

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Legal education in the United States is governed by national and state regulations that address different aspects of legal education and in this way form an intersecting web governing law schools and their activities and graduates. National regulators focus on law schools, while states instead address law school graduates seeking admission to practice law. While this multifaceted approached to regulating legal education establishes a core of requirements that yield some commonality of experience and substantive exposure, certain important aspects of legal education are left outside of this regime and are addressed only by particular states or not at all.

  PublisherDOI

• The Importance of Commonality and Difference in Global Legal Education Communities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• International Student Diasporas in Global Legal Education

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Translating the U.S. LLM Experience: The Need for a Comprehensive Examination

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Categorical closure: Transitivity and identities in longitudinal networks

  Social Networks · 2024-07-02 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Diverse Disconnectedness: Homophily, Social Capital Inequality, and Student Experiences in Law School

  Law & Social Inquiry · 2024-10-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• International Law Student Mobility in ContextUnderstanding Variations in Sticky Floors, Springboards, Stairways, and Slow Escalators

  2022-06-08 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter focuses on international students across degree programs in US law schools and uses their navigation of American legal education as a tool to unpack the everyday experience of legal globalization. While graduate degree programs still account for the largest segment of international students studying law in the United States, there has been a concurrent rise in the number of international students who pursue a JD—the more mainstream US law degree. In this Chapter, we make the case that while prominent, these paths to assimilation are not seamless for many students. In tracing these students and their mobility contexts, this Chapter makes three main contributions. First, it maps the changing demographics of international law student participation and explores the factors shaping students’ preferences, including the relative importance of access to training opportunities, language, immigration status, prior work experience, and lawyer regulation and licensing (at home and abroad). Second, it offers a set of four metaphorical categories to help think about these empirical processes: sticky floors, springboards, stairways and slow escalators. Using each of these broad categories, we suggest that students find different sources of persuasion and pushback as they navigate their respective paths within law schools. Students’ decisions are molded at different stages by different actors and institutional constraints, with ultimate choices (and, therefore, tracks) reflecting a range of interactions between each of these constraints and capacities. Finally, the pathways provide a framework for theorizing about malleable social capital and recursive transnational theory.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Where Do We Go From Here? International Students, Post-Pandemic Law Schools, and the Possibilities of Universal Design

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transnational Legal Practice

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Globalisation impacts every aspect of modern society and today's law graduates are expected to deal with complex legal problems that require knowledge and training that goes beyond domestic law. This textbook provides an overview of how law is becoming increasingly transnational, facilitating theoretical and practical engagement with transnational legal institutions and phenomena. It advances an analytic framework that will help students to understand what to look for when they encounter transnational legal institutions and practices, and what are the practical and normative implications of their findings. By considering both the theory and practice of transnational law and taking a discursive approach to the material, students are encouraged to arrive at their own conclusions. Adopting interdisciplinary techniques and using case studies from around the world, this book offers a holistic, balanced exploration of a new and emerging discipline.

  DOI

• TECHNOCAPITAL@BIGLAW.COM

  Northwestern journal of technology and intellectual property · 2021 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business

  The transformative potential of technology in legal practice is well recognized. But wholly apart from how law firms actually use technology is the question of what law firms say about how they use and relate to technology—in particular, how law firms communicate whether technology matters and has value in what they do. In the past, firms in the BigLaw category, especially at the top echelon, have grounded their reputations on the credentials and achievements of their lawyers. In this paper, we explore whether elite law firms use technology similarly by describing it as an additional tool of inter-firm competition—a sort of“technocapital” that wields power in the war for clients, talent, and reputation generally. Based on an in-depth review of the websites of fifty- one nationally recognized and highly ranked law firms, the article analyzes differences in how firms use tech as a means of promoting themselves.\nWe found that elite law firms adopt one of three distinct approaches. The most prestigious firms generally refrain from making claims about technology that might undercut the preeminence of their lawyers. Rather, tech is simply one among many organizing themes for describing what their lawyers do, whether on behalf of an industry or with regard to particular legal issues arising in the course of legal representations. A second group of firms couples their description of work for tech clients and on tech matters with claims of expertise in harnessing technology to provide conventional legal services better and faster. Finally, a small subset of firms describe tech as transformative of their practices and identities, and integral to their claims of being innovators. These firms’ descriptions of tech reveal its role as a kind of capital being used to distinguish themselves both from traditional law firms and from new entrants to the legal market. These variations in law firms’ descriptions of the importance and role of technology in their organizations offer insight into the ways in which tech serves as a new form of capital in the ongoing competition for status in the legal services market.

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Laurel S. Terry

  13 shared

• Swethaa Ballakrishnen

  13 shared

• Peter Ehrenhaft

  6 shared

• Robert E. Lutz

  Southwestern Law School

  6 shared

• Ellyn S. Rosen

  American Bar Association

  6 shared

• Lindsay Watkins

  5 shared

• Louis M. Rocconi

  5 shared

• Jae-Hyup Lee

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Commission member of the American Bar Association’s Ethics 2…
• Chair of the Standing Committee on International Trade in Le…