The Happy Lawyer
The Centerpiece of a Course Every Law School Should Teach
By
Todd David Peterson
The Happy Lawyer[1]
The Centerpiece of a Course Every Law School Should Teach
Todd David Peterson[2]
During the past decade a growing number of law professors and psychologists have devoted increasing attention to issues relating to the mental well-being of law students. Although earlier studies have shown higher levels of psychological distress, including elevated levels of depression, stress, and anxiety in law students, compared to medical students and other individuals in their age cohort,[3] these studies did not generate much momentum to address these issues in the law school environment. After the turn of the century, however, law professors and law students began to pay more attention to this issue as a growing number of studies focused on psychological distress among law students, and law professors began to discuss ways to address this problem.[4] In particular, Florida State law professor Larry Krieger has worked to bring attention to these issues and suggested ways for law students to deal with them,[5] and (with psychologist Kennan Sheldon) published a number of influential studies on law student psychological distress.[6] Professor Krieger has also created a “humanizing law school” web page to offer students suggestions on how to deal with issues of psychological distress and provide “some perspectives and advice about the issues of health and life/career satisfaction as a law student and lawyer.”[7] Other legal academics have also begun to focus on this issue both in writing[8] and institutionally. The new Section on Balance in Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) was created to address law student mental health concerns.[9] Law students themselves have also begun to attend to these issues. The Law Student Division of the American Bar Association (“ABA”) recently initiated a Law Student Mental Health Initiative, and it sponsored a “national mental health day” at law schools across the country.[10]
Coincidentally, during this same ten-year time span, researchers in the newly recognized field of positive psychology produced numerous books and hundreds of articles on the traits and conditions that lead to human thriving.[11] Positive psychology began its rapid development as a separate branch of psychological research when Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, devoted his first speech as president of the American Psychological Association to the subject and then published a special positive psychology issue of American Psychologist (the official journal of the American Psychological Association) in January 2000.[12] Positive psychology has revolutionized the study of human behavior by balancing the empirical psychological research on the causes of mental illness and distress with new research designed to study “positive emotions, positive character traits and enabling institutions.”[13] As Professor Seligman concluded, “the value of the overarching term positive psychology lies in its uniting of what had been scattered and disparate lines of theory and research about what makes life most worth living.”[14] By helping to explain what makes people happy and thrive, the field of positive psychology offers a wealth of new empirical research that could be used to address issues of law student mental health and well-being. As Professor Seligman himself recognized, “law schools are themselves a potential breeding ground for lawyer demoralization and that makes them – as
well as law firms – candidates for reform. In these ways the relationship between positive psychology and law becomes a subject for the further study in the legal academy, as well as in the profession at large.”[15]
In their wonderful new book, The Happy Lawyer,[16] Professors Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School took up the challenge to apply the new learning from the science of positive psychology to the issues that law students and lawyers face in creating happy and fulfilling careers in the law. Although law professors and psychologists (including Levit and Linder themselves) have used principles from the field of positive psychology as the core of articles on law student mental health and well-being,[17] this is the first book-length effort to apply the new science of happiness and well-being to the issue of law students and lawyers having happier and more meaningful lives and careers. It is far beyond the capacity of one book to assay the full range of positive psychology research and apply it to the entire range of issues related to the happiness of law students and lawyers, but Levit and Linder have done a marvelous job of culling the most significant principles from the latest psychological research and showing both lawyers and law students how they can use this information to improve the quality of their lives and careers. This noteworthy achievement makes The Happy Lawyer essential reading for law students, professors and administrators. Moreover, although The Happy Lawyer seems principally addressed to individual law students and lawyers, it can be the cornerstone of law school courses and programs designed to improve student mental health and well being and help students map the course of happy and meaningful future careers.
Unfortunately, few law schools now offer such courses or programs. This Article argues that law schools have an obligation to educate law students about how they can achieve meaningful and personally satisfying careers in the law and, in addition, how they can buffer themselves against the stress and depression that far too frequently arise in both law school and the practice of law. Experience teaches us that law students are unlikely to be able to accomplish these goals effectively on their own. Far too many students suffer through their law school experience only to find that their subsequent legal careers are unrewarding and emotionally stressful. Moreover, as this Article discusses in more detail below, the very legal skills law schools teach to help students become effective lawyers are likely to contribute to mental and emotional distress in their private lives. Fortunately, we now have sufficient empirical psychological research on happiness that we can teach students how to meet the emotional challenges of law school and the legal profession, and identify the kind of legal practice that will make for a happy professional career.
This Article proceeds in three main sections. In Part I, the Article discusses why law schools have an obligation to teach students how to find happy and rewarding legal careers and deal with the emotional well-being issues that so often arise in law school. Ideally, this would involve a course on finding satisfaction in the legal profession, of which The Happy Lawyer could be the centerpiece. The course should be just one part of a larger program that could include presentations and programs relevant to the issue and should involve a law school’s career development office, as well as thestudent advising office. In Part II, the Article takes a detailed look at the Levit and Linder book and explains why it has the potential to be the keystone of a law school’s student wellness program. Finally, in Part III the Article discusses a number of topics that are not discussed at length in The Happy Lawyer, but which should also be a part of any law school student wellness program.
I.Why Law Schools Have an Obligation to Teach Students How to Have Happy and Meaningful Legal Careers
As an initial matter, it is important to establish why every law school should have a program that helps law students understand how to have a happy and meaningful career in the law. Although Levit and Linder note that only six law schools offer courses that are even tangentially related to the subject of building a happy legal career,[18] they do not have an extended discussion of how such a course might be structured, or why law schools might have a moral obligation to help their students achieve a more satisfying law school and legal career. They simply rhetorically ask, “How can law schools help students make good career choices if they offer no courses on career satisfaction?”[19] Because The Happy Lawyer clearly would be the cornerstone of any course on that topic, it may just be that the authors are modestly avoiding a sales pitch for their own book. So, this Article will make that pitch for them.
Law schools should be creating courses on happy lawyering for a wide range of reasons. First, law schools have a moral obligation to their students to help them deal with the challenges to their subjective well-being because law schools play an active role in creating many of those difficulties. We teach students to be critical and to find flaws in agreements and opinions. We teach them to be pessimistic by training them to anticipate problems and bad outcomes, and plan for any negative eventuality. This daily training in negative thinking builds neural pathways in students’ brains that will cause them to evaluate themselves much more critically and be much more likely to adopt a pessimistic, explanatory style that sees difficulties as pervasive and permanent, rather than local and temporary.[20] Recent psychological research demonstrates that these ways of perceiving one’s self and one’s personal difficulties are likely to make individuals much more prone to stress and depression.[21] These skills may be necessary for effective lawyering, but they also create problems that law schools must address. It is simply not morally defensible to ignore the problems that are due at least in part to the training we provide.
The story of how law schools create conditions that lead to the development of depression begins with a computer game called Tetris. Tetris is a game in which four kinds of shapes fall from the top of the screen and the player can rotate and move them until they hit the bottom. When the block creates an unbroken horizontal line across the entire screen the line disappears.
The object of the game is to complete as many unbroken lines as possible so the blocks pile up and reach the top of the screen, at which point the game ends. As many gamers discovered, Tetris is a deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive game. A group of Harvard researchers studied subjects who were assigned to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row.[22] For many days after they participated in the experiment, the subjects saw Tetris like shapes everywhere they went and imagined how they could fit them together in the smallest possible space. This phenomenon is familiar to many who have obsessively played the game, including one who described his experience this way: “Walking through the aisles at the local Acme, trying to decide between Honey Nut or the new frosted Cheerios, I noticed how perfectly one set of cereal boxes would fit in with the gap on the row below it. Running doggedly around the track at the Y, bored out of my mind, I find myself focusing on the brick wall and calculating which direction I’d have to rotate those slightly darker bricks to make them fit with the uneven row of dark bricks a few feet further down the wall. Going out to get some fresh air after hours of work, I rub my watery, stinging eyes, look up at the Philadelphia skyline, and wonder, if I flip the Victory building on its side would it fit into the gap between Liberties I and II?”[23]
This condition, called the Tetris effect, is just one example of a much larger psychological concept. Consistently training your mind to look at things in a particular way leads the mind to look at the world in this fashion, even after the person leaves the context in which the pattern developed.[24] So, for example, one Harvard researcher reported that after a marathon session of playing the video game Grand Theft Auto with a group of students in a Harvard dorm, he found himself examining the cars he passed outside the dorm as potential targets for theft and even imagining the theft of a Cambridge police cruiser.[25]
It turns out that there is a neurological explanation for the Tetris effect. Repeated actions over a period of time create new neuropathways in the brain, which create channels the mind has a tendency to follow repetitively. Scientists once believed that the brain was fixed after the age of three and that no new brain cells developed thereafter. New research, however, has demonstrated the phenomenon of neurogenesis, the development of new neurons in the brain in response to repeated stimuli.[26] This discovery has led to an understanding of the concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can change,grow, and develop new neuropathways. For example, in one famous study, researchers looked at the brain of London taxi drivers, who are required to learn their way around the incredibly complex and disordered structure of the London streets. The researchers discovered that in these taxi drivers the hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with visual memory, was significantly enlarged.[27] The daily exercise of navigating the London streets had created new brain cells to perform the task effectively. Similarly, when one develops a habitual way of looking for particular patterns, whether it is the way falling blocks fit together in a line or a particular way of analyzing logical problems (thinking like a lawyer), the brain builds neuropathways that tend to channel our thinking through the same pathway, even when we are not engaging in the activity that created the neuropathway to begin with.
So, we should ask, what neuropathways do we create in law school? What habitual patterns of thought do we create and reinforce so that, in another example of the Tetris effect, students will be likely to habitually follow that pattern of thinking even when they are outside of the classroom? First, law school classes relentlessly pursue the identification of flaws and problems in legal arguments and opinions. We identify the flaws in the cases we teach and use the Socratic method to help students identify the flaws in their reasoning and understanding. This relentless training in fault-finding inevitably carries over into the way students look at themselves and their lives outside the classroom. Because of this training they are more likely to emphasize their shortcomings and mistakes and less likely to focus on their achievement and talents. Inevitably, if we train our brains to look for flaws, we will find them wherever we look, and we will be looking for them all the time because that is the neuropathway that we constructed. As countless psychological studies have shown, this kind of fault-finding is a recipe for unhappiness, stress, and depression.[28]
Second, law school is a three-year lesson in pessimism. It begins in the first year as students are trained both subconsciously and consciously to anticipate bad outcomes and problems in the future. The torts class is a semester-long exposure to all the bad things that can happen in life. There is no better illustration of the Tetris effect than the too-familiar stories of law students going home for Christmas and seeing everything around them as a source of a potential negligence action.[29] The pessimism training continues in a more conscious way in other classes, where students are taught to anticipate potential problems and plan for them in advance.[30] Students trained to anticipate problems in their roles as lawyers will inevitably anticipate problems and approach life more pessimistically even when they leave the law school building. Law school tends to build and reinforce neuropathways that make the expectation of problems habitual and difficult to avoid. Once again, numerous psychological studies make clear how destructive such a pessimistic approach is to one’s happiness.[31]
Finally, law school courses train students to resolve conflicts and problems through logical argumentation. If a position cannot be logically argued and justified, then it must be rejected and a more logical argument developed. This conclusion is reinforced by the recent study by Elizabeth Mertz, an anthropologist, law professor, and senior fellow at the America Bar Foundation, who published a study of first-year contract courses at eight different law schools.[32] Mertz studied classes taught by professors with very different perspectives and teaching styles, but she found that in all of the classes students were taught to “think like lawyers,” by setting aside their own feelings of empathy and compassion and substituting a strictly analytical and strategic mode of thinking.[33] Such training develops durable neuropathways that will inevitably be applied whenever students deal with conflicts, even if those conflicts are emotional issues with their significant others and other loved ones. Notwithstanding the fact that the application of such an approach to one’s private life is guaranteed to engender only anger in the person who is out-argued but whose emotions are not recognized and acknowledged as legitimate, it will be difficult for law students to escape the training they receive daily in law school, or even to recognize that they are applying that training in their personal life.[34] As a result, personal relationships suffer, and so does the emotional health and well-being of the law student.