About John Monahan's forthcoming study ("Lawyers at Mid-Career: A 20-Year Longitudinal Study of Job and Life Satisfaction"):

I think what Anjali referred to as "all the standard problems of getting people to self-report on their own happiness" may be that expressions of overall happiness are not quite the same as overall happiness. [Oops! I see Anjali also replied while I was writing this.] As Prof. Monahan said, ideally he would have done something like the classic Csikszentmihalyi studies, where participants wore beepers and were asked at random moments throughout the day to record their momentary state of mind. This lessens reporting bias ("Look at my life! I ought to be happy overall. So I guess I am."): people are more willing to say "I'm frustrated right now" on many occasions than to say "I'm usually not satisfied."

As Lauren points out, the forthcoming study has an extremely high response rate compared to earlier studies. Among these earlier studies was one that found that 11% of North Carolina attorneys considered suicide at least once a month every month for the last year. (This and other studies were summarized in a famous 1999 meta-study, Schiltz, P., On Being A Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member Of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 871.)

The new study strongly suggests that lawyers do not report less happiness than others (earlier studies had suggested that lawyers do report much less happiness), that government lawyers report the most happiness, and that big-firm lawyers (even after 15 years, when most people who discover that big firms are not for them have long left) report a statistically-significant lower happiness (but are still quite happy).

-- GregJohnson - 05 Mar 2009

On the topic of having autonomy as a junior government lawyer: An anecdote in yesterday's Times describes a prosecutor who tried to lose a case he didn't believe had merit (rather than, say, resign or openly abandon the government's position). He argued that his client was the people and that they "would have been ill served had two innocent men remained in jail for a crime they did not commit." He's been notified that he won't be disbarred.

-- GregJohnson - 05 Mar 2009