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DanielKetaniSecondPaper 5 - 05 Jun 2012 - Main.DanielKetani

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Anxiety and the Law

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Ironically, the reason your thesis makes me a bit uncomfortable is because I am uncertain as to how we future lawyers are supposed to carry this plan out. How are we supposed to master anxiety as law students and lawyers in the future? How do we become comfortable with uncertainty? Should we keep a list of past situation in which we encountered uncertainty and it worked out? Should we try to always keep an hour of each day open so that we become comfortable with having an ‘unplanned’ slot fill our schedule, and anything uncertain that comes up can fill that slot? Should we practice some sort of behavioural therapy when we encounter an uncertain situation (i.e. force ourselves to smile or listen to something that makes us laugh whenever we encounter something uncertain, so that we learn to associate feelings of happiness with uncertainty)?

-- SkylarPolansky - 04 Jun 2012 \ No newline at end of file

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Thanks for all your feedback. The current draft is, I feel, somewhat incomplete and I plan on editing it sometime this week once I've thought some issues through and get a chance. As far as Langdell, that's a really interesting quote, but I don't want to discuss him too much because I don't think the current teaching method is the same as Langdell's. Most casebooks I've seen try to illuminate the tensions in the law that Langdell would seem to have denied existing. I think it's kind of strange that the method of teaching still used is still so similar to Langdell's despite the abandonment of his ideas, I don't know if that's just path dependency or if there are other reasons such as its utility in actually proving Langdell's theories wrong.

As far as uncertainty, I think the issue is not so much how to become comfortable with it but instead not to deny it. In both our professional and personal lives, there will always be uncertainty and to think otherwise is just self-delusion. Uncertainty IS uncomfortable. Trying to come up with behavioral therapy to make oneself associate it with happiness seems kind of silly to me, its basically an attempt to turn uncertainty into certainty. Anxiety sucks, but it could also be viewed as an opportunity to think realistically about one's concerns and priorities. Trying to hide the complexity and uncertainty of choices with formalism or merlot is just an escape from dealing with the problems; trying to use cognitive conditioning to be happy with uncertainty seems to me like a similar albeit stranger solution, maybe others view this differently.

-- DanielKetani - 05 Jun 2012

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Revision 5	r5 - 05 Jun 2012 - 14:12:38 - DanielKetani
Revision 4	r4 - 04 Jun 2012 - 23:18:53 - SkylarPolansky

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