Character Overview
Robinette is introduced as having been raised in Harlem and worked his way through law school and into the Manhattan District Attorney's office at a young age. He works under Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty), whom he comes to think of as a mentor, despite occasionally disagreeing with his prosecution methods.
Robinette advocates racial equality through equal treatment, including equal punishment; while he abhors racism, he also feels little sympathy for black people who turn to crime. He insists on being given the same opportunities as the equal of his white colleagues, without what he feels are added advantages from affirmative action policies.
In the first season episode "Out of the Half-Light", Stone asks Robinette if he thinks of himself as "a black lawyer, or a lawyer who's black". Originally considering himself the latter, Robinette would gradually come to think of race as a more integral part of his reasons for practicing law. He later confirms this in the 1996 episode "Custody".
Read more about this topic: Paul Robinette
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“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
—John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974)