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IlanaDuttonFirstEssay 4 - 20 Feb 2023 - Main.EbenMoglen
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Vicarious Trauma in Public Interest Lawyering: | | | It took me a while to recover, and I still feel the impacts at times, but despite that, I am diving back into public interest law this summer at Kids in Need of Defense. I know this is the career that I want to pursue, so I am going into this summer with a plan to protect my well-being while also bringing compassion to the work. I’m going to speak with my supervisor early, to learn about how they cope with exposure to second-hand trauma. I’m going to maintain a routine, which includes healthy eating and exercise, both of which have been shown to mitigate the impacts of vicarious trauma. Finally, I’m going to try different types of boundaries, to see what works for me. I hope that this summer I can begin building a practice in public interest law that is sustainable. | |
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An excellent start. It accomplishes very well one of the most important functions of a first draft: to clear away the brush and show the question around which the next draft can grow.
We can leave for another moment the question whether the science bears out the hypothesis of vicarious trauma. After we've read Frank Putnam in a couple of weeks it would perhaps make sense to return to this question in a revision. The essay's central idea doesn't depend on any particular theoretical formulation for its overwhelming force. We could also say that lawyering for individual clients not only means forming a personal relationship, but also one directly fraught with the client's vulnerability and the lawyer's responsibility. However we formulate the nature of the resulting psychic cost to the lawyer, it can't just be dissociated, as you say. But on that point Larry Joseph's "Something Split" in Lawyerland, which we are also about to read, is succinct and disturbing.
So how should practice involving individual clients, like other types of practice—by social workers, psychotherapists, school counselors—that involve similar "empathy costs" be organized to be psychically fulfilling, or at least not damaging, to the lawyer? The best route to improvement, I think, is to put that question at the center of the next draft.
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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