The Widening Occupational Space of Jurists: Differentiation and Stratification of Danish Jurists (1974–2019)

This paper joins the discussion on differentiation and stratification of legal professionals through the lens of Danish law graduates and the evolution of their careers from the 1970s. Using register data, we analyse the job positions and wages of six cohorts 20 years after their graduation. This enables us to sketch an overview of, on the one hand, the professional spaces the law grads occupy at a specific point in time, and on the other, gain insight into the overall trajectories of the different cohorts, as well as the more specific trajectories of different professional groupings. These groupings are then examined in terms of their wages and corporate income to get an understanding of the degree of stratification of each group within each cohort, and thereby the social hierarchy structuring the cohort.