Lawyer Identity Formation

Law school is a lawyer factory, and to make lawyers you have to shape and change the raw material... aka students.  This process is much harsher than it needs to be, resulting in widespread feelings of despair, anxiety, loss of a sense of self and loss of values.  As mentioned in previous posts, studies have shown that 44% of students are clinically distressed, and the trauma of law school contributes significantly to depression and substance abuse among lawyers.  But what is the process the school uses to change us?  Here are some of my preliminary thoughts on the methods used

• Grades
• Law school focuses on external motivators, like grades, to tell us how we are progressing in becoming lawyers.  The centrality of grades and the collective drive for the top grades pushes us to not only want good grades, but to start judging ourselves and our worth based on our grades.  Through the process we become disconnected from our original internal motivators, whatever they were, and start to focus on external symbols of our worth.  Thus, once we take up the new motivation, our identity shifts closer to the standard lawyer model.
• Grades feel arbitrary, and this sense of loss of control can drive people up the wall.  They work themselves to an unhealthy level to try to attain some level of control.  This raises the level of anxiety and since we are expected to work at unhealthy levels we are taught that this is just a normal part of being a lawyer.
• Lecture
• The competition in some classes is palpable, especially where the Socratic Method is used.  Some students compete to preform in front of their peers, while a large segment simply withdraws from what feels like an unpleasant atmosphere in class.  Cynicism and a hyper-competitive atmosphere develop from this.
• The details of what we are told lawyers do, think and behave greatly impacts how we form our identity.  The most prominent example from my first year was being told over and over again that the prime motivation of a lawyer is to win.  Winning at all costs excludes considerations like morals and the impact our actions have on others.
• How questions are framed by professors and what information we are told is not important also greatly affect how we see lawyers.  Emotions are often (not always, but often) thought to be beside the point of what lawyers do.  
• The content of classes, 
• It focuses primarily on analytical and logical kinds of skills at the expense of interpersonal, experiential, and organizational skills.  This teaches us that lawyers prize analytical skills over client interaction skills, for example.
• How professors interact with students
• The aloofness and inaccessibility of many professors supports the perception that lawyers are inherently alienated from people.  

I'm sure there is more, but that is all that comes to mind right now.  Comment if you think of anything to add!

March Hastings Herald Article

Last March I wrote an opinion piece for the first issue of the Hastings Herald. Here is a slightly changed version of it, the footnote format is alittle off, my apologies:

Humanizing Law School

Most people tell me that humanizing law school is impossible. Well, don’t lose hope, students of Hastings, change is in the air. There has been a surprising amount of movement on the issue in the law school industry. Recently, a mass of critical scholarly articles and books have been published calling for systemic and cultural reforms that would re-invent law school and the experience of its students. Some schools have started conducting pilot programs, and the top schools have abolished oppressive grading systems.

And it is about time. Rates of clinically significant levels of depression in law school can range as high as HALF of the student body. 1. Medical school, with its similar workload, has nowhere near the depression rates of law school. 1. This pain arises from the hyper-competition and excessive conformity that law school generates in otherwise happy and healthy people. 1. Put simply, this suffering is caused by the design of law school. 1. You know something is wrong with a pedagogical method when half the students who are subjected to it become mentally ill.

The culture of competition and conformity is the specter that stunts our school’s community and traumatizes our peers. 2. Students feel compelled to abandon their ideals and principles, to abandon their sense of self so they can fit into the “lawyer” mold. 2. I know I have been told over and over again that I will have to do things as a lawyer that violate my personal beliefs. Thinking like a lawyer is the primary objective, other pursuits need to fall away because if you aren’t thinking in that specific way, you won’t make the grade. This pressure to conform stifles creative thought and amounts to an all-out assault on our person-hood. 2. People literally lose themselves to law school, losing their self-identity to an institution-generated standard replacement identity. 2.

Identity is deeply intertwined with what motivates us. 2. Law school tends to quash our internal motivations (such as helping others or working for a cause) in favor of external motivations like grades, high profile internships, and high paying jobs after law school. 3. This happens to such an extent that students feel compelled to travel down a very uniform, risk-averse track and make choices that do not reflect their original reasons for going to law school. 2. The compulsion to avoid risks prevents students from taking innovative classes and pushing themselves to make the most of the opportunities afforded by law school. 2. But, I think what is worse is that the pedagogical style of law school conditions us to become insecure, anxious and unhappy. 3. All of this transfers into the legal profession as well, as the trauma of law school has a lasting impact on the psyche of lawyers as well as the practice of law in this country. 3.

By causing the loss of personal principles, self-identity, and purpose, law school emotionally scars its students. 4. All this pain disrupts our personal lives, but more importantly for the school, it hurts our ability to learn, retain and apply knowledge. 5. The policies and pedagogy of law school undermine the entire purpose of school.

Needless to say, when I read about all this, I was quite disturbed. I have noticed the effect law school has had on me, and it has been both scary and enraging. I am sure some people will respond with, “if you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Well, this is bigger than just me, this problem affects the entire legal profession. 1. My own brief research has just scratched the surface of these issues, but it seems apparent that humanizing law school is the inevitable path that Hastings must take. Indeed, Hastings has already implemented programs meant to help students and address these problems (like the fantastic Academic Support Program). But further change in the policies, pedagogy and culture of law school is necessary, and to have that we must have a campus-wide discussion. To further that discussion, here are some questions:

What changes can we implement to address these problems?
What would a humanized law school look like?
What specific skills do you wish law school would teach?
Which classes were the most effective at teaching and why?
What are the aspects of law school that you love?
I want to hear your opinions, send in letters to the editor or shoot me an email at pasleyw@uchastings.edu.

Footnotes:
1. Peterson, Todd; Peterson, Elizabeth Stemming the Tide of Law Student Depression: What Law Schools Need to Learn from the Science of Positive Psychology. Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics, Issue 2 (2009) (http://www.abajournal.com/uploads/2010/06/PetersonArticle.pdf) Sadly this link no longer works. I have a PDF copy if you want to read it, just shoot me an email.

2. Sturm , Susan; Guinier, Lani; The Law School Matrix: Reforming Legal Education in a Culture ofCompetition and Conformity, Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 60, No. 2, p. 515, 2007 (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1018085)


3. Sheldon, Kennon; Krieger, Lawrence , Does Legal Education have Undermining Effects on Law Students? Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-Being. Behavioral Sciences and the Law 22: 261–286 (2004) (http://web.missouri.edu/~sheldonk/pdfarticles/BSL04.pdf)

4. Krieger, Lawrence, Human Nature as a New Guiding Philosophy for Legal Education and the Profession. Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 47, 247-312, 2008 (http://washburnlaw.edu/wlj/47-2/articles/krieger-lawrence.pdf)

5. Fines, Barbara, Fundamental Principles and Challenges of Humanizing Legal Education. Washburn Law Journal, Vol. 47, 313-326, 2008 (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/profiles/glesnerfines/humanizing.pdf)