Frequently Asked Questions

How did this get started?
This is a sort of budding movement involving many individual law teachers seeking to address the health and welfare issues of their students. My litigation experience sensitized me to the persistent distress of many lawyers. When I started teaching in law school, I observed similar patterns in many law students. I found that many other teachers already had the same concerns, and that some were also trying to address them in their classes or clinics. We established a List Serve for law teachers as a way for interested teachers to discuss and develop our ideas. Those discussions lead to various conference presentations. It's been interesting to see that these presentations always draw substantial attendance, which again shows latent demand in a sense—concern for the well-being of students that many law teachers and administrators around the country already share.

Why include attorneys in your focus?
This is crucial because attorneys as a group are so incredibly important to the functioning of our society. On a more human and personal level, these attorneys were once our students. All of our college mission statements talk about producing highly professional attorneys and serving the needs of our society; we can't overlook the product of our educational processes when we talk about service to others.

Are the negative reports about law students and lawyers a reflection of the kind of people that choose law school in the first place?
This is an open question that I am investigating with a psychologist, Ken Sheldon. The first study that we have completed indicates that new law students are actually quite happy and idealistic about helping others—a rather different picture from the stereotypes of lawyers. However, this study also showed a troubling shift during the first year of law school—away from the kinds of values and goals that support happiness in general, and towards those which do not. So this may be something about which we need to educate ourselves, and our students, to go along with the technical legal training we provide.

It's also important to point out that, while many people are curious about whether law students are especially prone to distress, competitiveness, etc., this is far from the end of the story. After all, virtually all reports point to significant problems of distress, dissatisfaction, and unprofessional behavior among lawyers, and we in legal education have the best opportunity to counteract those tendencies since we manage the earliest formative years of every lawyer-in-training.

What kind of research has been done on law students?
Many small studies of law students have been published; they are summarized and organized in Professor Susan Daicoff's work. With regard to the larger, more methodologically sound studies, there are two fundamentally different, but complementary, approaches. The major examples of traditional studies—those that focus on symptoms of dysfunction or distress—have been accomplished by Benjamin, Kazniak and Sales, and by Shanfield and Benjamin, in the 1980's. These studies support the common observation that law school is very stressful for many people, and that anxiety, depression, and other kinds of emotional distress increase dramatically in many people once they start law school. Similar studies of practising lawyers have provided very similar results. These studies and Professor Daicoff's summary of the many others are referenced in the bibliography here.

I became interested in a different approach to research, in order to focus on why these symptoms are so common in students and in lawyers, so that we might counteract their development through our legal education processes. Professor Ken Sheldon and I are using methods developed during two decades of research in "positive psychology": we focus on positive markers such as well-being and life satisfaction, as well as those attitudes, values, goals, and motivations that correlate with these positive life experiences. Our first study confirms the negative findings of Benjamin and his teams, and goes further to suggest that changes in values and motivation that we found during the first three semesters of law school may be causing or contributing to these problems. This paper explains in some detail the relevant aspects of positive psychology and their apparent connection to the study and practice of law.

Does this initiative for a "humanizing dimension" in legal education relate to all the talk about ethics and professionalism that we hear these days?
Yes, there are close relationships among all these issues. First, the qualities which positive psychology has identified as helpful to happiness and thriving have much in common with those values typically listed as desirable for professionalism—integrity, altruism, cooperation and community-mindedness. Conversely, those qualities experimentally identified as damaging to happiness—the competitive drives for wealth, power, and the like, are commonly reported as factors undermining the professional behavior of modern lawyers. Second, more traditional psychological research indicates that lawyers as a group are unusually prone to experience depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and other kinds of emotional distress. It is certainly unrealistic to think that a depressed, insecure person will be able to live the high ideals of the professional lawyer. So the individual's level of well being will likely affect her level of professionalism. Some Professional Responsibility courses recognize this link, and deal directly with lawyer satisfaction and health issues as a result. And almost everyone agrees that those lawyers who are highly "professional" (have qualities such as high integrity, trustworthiness, and respect for others) are both happier and more successful than other lawyers. So if we can add a dimension to legal education that promotes well-being and healthy attitudes in law students, we are probably directly benefitting the level of professionalism among future lawyers as well.