Spartan Lawyer Winter 2018
LAW SCHOOL IS HARD.
CAN LAW STUDENTS BE HAPPY?
Happiness will come in time if you stay on track with yourself, your relationships, and the meaning in your work.
Is it possible for law school to prepare students for happiness?
To those in the business of educating future lawyers, that question is particularly salient. Ideally, law school would amplify the psychological traits that lead to happiness, starting new lawyers out with a solid foundation. For many students, however, it seems that the law school experience itself can sow the seeds of future unhappiness. Students graduate with higher levels of distress and lower internal motivation for legal work than when they started law school.1
It’s a process that Abijah Taylor, assistant dean for Student and Academic Affairs, witnesses with each incoming class of 1Ls. While every personal situation is different, the same problems bring students to his office every semester.
“It’s the weight of unmet expectations,” Abijah said. “The things that we prioritize here – they create a lot of pressure for students.”
Unsurprisingly, most students struggle under the burden of continually competing against their similarly-talented classmates. But this stress may be unnecessary in the long term; Krieger and Sheldon’s research indicates that traditional status markers for law students (like class rank and making it onto a journal) have zero impact on future happiness.2
Abijah described the “everybody else” factor that pervades the law school experience: the sense that everybody else navigates law school with ease, and that no one else feels confused or out of place. But that’s almost certainly not the case, and breaking down those feelings of isolation can result in more social support.
A member of the Class of ’09, Abijah knows firsthand that law school is better when you invest in human connections, and he continually encourages students to reach out for help: to faculty members, to family and friends, to one another.
Time management is the hard part, Abijah noted, but converting every minute of the day into study time isn’t a value-add. “We always tell students, ‘if you had a hobby before law school, keep doing that.’ Hobbies help you to balance yourself, and I don’t want them to let go of those things.”
1 Kennon M. Sheldon & Lawrence S. Krieger, Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-Being, 22 Behav. Sci. L., 261 (2004).
2 Lawrence S. Krieger & Kennon M. Sheldon, What Makes Lawyers Happy? A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, 83 Geo. Wash. L. Rev., 554 (2015), at 620.