Taking the First Step in Earnest: Daring to Build Better Lawyers

-- By ConnorHudson - 06 Mar 2022

Introduction

The Adaptable Mind: Neuroscience, Psychology, & Law School

The institutions inculcating students into American legal realism are divorced from the realities of legal practice and fetishize ivory tower idealism to the detriment of combatting the pathologies undermining student success in law school and in practice, including frequent depression and suicidal ideation (NEW YORK BAR ASSOCIATION). As a first step in daring to build better lawyers, rather than fulfilling the labor demands of the legal industry, law schools should create a first-year reading group adapting the psychological frameworks employed in leading universities and business schools -- The Adaptable Mind: Neuroscience, Psychology, and Law School.

By creating a space for students to implement positive performance psychology throughout their legal education, students and schools can align on improving outcomes, creating better lawyer-people and lawyer-managers -- attributes of increasing professional import-- by effectuating understanding of how the way we wire our brains catalyzes success, reducing burnout, increasing resilience and satisfaction, developing healthier relationships, and improving empathy. However, this is not merely a call to altruism, as student benefits will inure to schools with the humility to embrace recommendations as transformative as they are trite.

An Illustration

While not the subject of discussion, I hope my arrival at, unceremonious departure from, and return to Columbia Law School will illustrate that this is not unbridled idealism, uninformed to the particularities of school administration, but a moral and utilitarian imperative. On March 15, 2020 -- the day that we acquiesced to the epidemic -- my mother passed away following an extended battle with cancer, necessitating that I leave my senior spring at USC and move home to Tucson, Arizona to care for my siblings. While I would never dare abdicate this responsibility, these circumstances framed matriculation to Columbia as a saving grace, the end of my ordeal.

I arrived to a closed campus and abject isolation. Amidst the rolling hills of pompous praise heaped upon Columbia's "most competitive class yet," no one dared broach the question of whether we were equipped to undertake a bleak semester in a desolate New York. For me, the requisite contemplation arrived too late, as an aggressive depression sapped my energy, undermined my retention, and cast me off towards despair. Thankfully, before I could succumb to the weight of darkness, I found a fleeting moment of clarity to arrange a medical leave.

In the intervening year, I found myself wanting for the basic skills that had carried me to Columbia and arduously seeking an uncertain equilibrium to stake my return upon. The following fall, I met the same canned hypocrisy as before -- you are "brilliant" enough to receive autonomy where we abdicate responsibility but must succeed within parameters of unflinching custom followed with blind fidelity. From my terse glance behind the curtain, I knew the questions I needed to answer to fulfill my singular goal -- to survive, grades be damned -- and I struggled alone through the topics I now hope to integrate into the 1L curriculum.

The Adaptable Mind Reading Group

The Blueprint

The Adaptable Mind can be seamlessly implemented in the 1L curriculum, as soon as Fall 2022, by emulating the best practices of peer institutions. The foundation of the reading group would be built off of the proven successes of Harvard Business School's "Leadership and Happiness" course (SYLLABUS) and Yale Professor Laurie Santos' lauded "Happiness and the Good Life" course.

Structure

The reading group would run for the first 10 weeks of each semester through biweekly modules following two meetings to bookend fall Legal Methods.

Two sessions at the beginning of the fall will provide students with the crucial opportunity to frame 1L as a period of self-actualization, liberating students from the reductive, myopic focus on apocryphal conceptions of success in law school. Before Legal Methods, students would participate in a workshop entitled "Who am I?" enabling students to reflect on what brought them to law school and to set untainted goals before the mechanistic pressures of 1L ceaselessly incentivize conformity. At the end of Legal Methods, students will be prompted to consider what will be required to personally succeed in the "How Do I Work?" module. These workshops will reduce the the infantilization of higher education (Footnote 1) by granting students the agency and space to determine their approach to law school.

Subsequently, the group will proceed through five two-week modules, focusing on topics that personalize growth, develop empathy, and destroy caustic, false conceptions of isolated suffering, including Healthy Sleep Habits, Why Your Brain Feels the Way it Does (Forgetfulness, Brain Fog, etc.), Positive Psychology, and the Power of Emotions. During Week 1 of each module, students will select between two 1-2-hour reading/lecture pairings within the specified topic. During Week 2, students will choose to either write a short reflection on practical implementation or attend a mentor-led discussion. This structure will offer a single reprieve for student agency in both the selection of learning and method of participation. Additionally, by incentivizing candor and community participation, the reading group will allow students to situate themselves in law school as a shared experience and mindfully attend to their needs without feeling compelled to paint themselves a classroom hero or fearing derogation for vulnerability.

Institutional Benefits

However, this is not a plea for administrations to take notice of struggles they would rather not acknowledge. Instead, this structure will increase institutional productivity by catalyzing student success and providing meaningful differentiation in applicant attraction and matriculation. As firms, law schools are beholden to fulfilling a demand-side role in the legal-industrial complex, commodifying students, stifling intellectual innovations, and leaving value unrecognized. The Adaptable Mind can help unlock legal progress by supporting creative thinking about the legal profession during pupils' formative years and empowering diverse aspirations that are reflective of the array of opportunities available to trained lawyers outside the sanctified triumvirate of BigLaw, Clerkships, and Public Interest. Furthermore, by bolstering subjective conceptions of success, first-movers can improve enrollment by achieving a meaningful competitive advantage over peer institutions.

Fin

Holistically, integrating the Adaptable Mind as a 1-unit, 2-semester reading group would be a first step towards daring to prepare students for a life, not a career, as a lawyer, unlocking student and institutional success in the process.

Footnote 1: Infantilization of Higher Education

• JSTOR: Emotional Problems of Higher Education, Peter Loewenberg (arguing that graduate education induces an unacknowledged Freudian transference that imposes five stages of emotional challenges before intellectual maturity can be achieved).