Ethical Ambition

For decades, law professor Derrick Bell has counseled students who feel pulled between their principles and the intense pressure to succeed at any cost. Here he turns that experience inward, reflecting on his own achievements and asking how ambition and integrity can coexist.

The book is a personal meditation rather than a set of rules. Bell confronts some of the hardest questions a life can raise, and he goes beyond posing them by offering practical answers he has reached himself.

Bell was one of the best-known law professors in the United States, a civil rights lawyer and an early figure in critical race theory. His background gives the reflections a weight drawn from years of teaching and public struggle.