Anxiety and the Law

I think you hit on a very important psychological reaction (or condition) of lawyers, so thank you for your contribution. Just to add some support to your introduction, regarding law as science, the casebook method was developed by a professor at Harvard (Christopher Langdell) in the late 1800s. Here's a quote from a student note that I found refreshing and that you might find interesting:

Langdell premised his positivist approach to legal studies on the idea that law is a science and that students should approach law as a science, uncovering rules of law by using inductive reasoning... Langdell premised his methodology on the positivist notion that law is a science (thus, objective) and that students should study law as such. He therefore chose for his casebooks cases that got the law right. Though scholars have largely discredited the idea of law as science, the case method still tends to lead students to hunt for rules and to discount or ignore cases that seem to stray from those rules. However, it is precisely these cases that can show the limits of the law and the weaknesses of a particular rule. It is only by focusing on the subjective aspects of the law, the human side of a case, that law students will truly learn this important aspect of lawyering. The case method can lead law students to become frustrated with cases that seem to come out wrong, that is, cases in which judges seem to break rules and misapply laws. The Langdellian law-as-science model feeds this frustration because of its search for clarity over justice and for predictability over personality.

When it comes to your concerns on anxiety, it may be this emphasis on "clarity" rather than being a human vessel for your client's story that frustrates the anxious lawyer. Mastering anxiety, generally, is a having mastery over one's identity and purpose. Re-invisioning the role of a lawyer, as we have been doing for the last semester with Eben, is step one. I hope this helps.

-- ArleneOrtizLeytte - 04 Jun 2012