On Monday I had the privilege of being one of the first people to welcome a number (59, to be exact) of our new 1Ls to law school. In the introductory session I shared with them a lot of the ideas I have been working with in this blog. I hope I gave these students a fair shake.
Exhibit A: Disconnection
We are discussing Larry Krieger’s booklet, “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress.“
“Stress” = primarily images of white men and women in office settings clutching their brains. Ultimately, the head explodes.
Today I want to spend more time discussing the insights from Prof. Larry Krieger’s booklet, “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress.“ It is an incredibly helpful resource in the battle to manage and reduce our overall levels of stress—primarily because it offers a different way of thinking about and analyzing the sources of stress in our education and career. For this reason, I would argue that it is a good resource for law students and practicing lawyers alike.
I am somewhat obsessed with the hidden cultural messages in the results of Google Images searches. There are any number of wonderful/horrible images associated with the word “stress,” but this has to be the most fantastic by far. Without bothering to find out why the image was actually there, I speculate: Is the cow stressed because he (no utter) is being required to perform outside of his natural environment? Or is this a happy heifer who has shed society’s expectations to pursue his dream? At any rate, it makes me laugh—a proven “stress-buster.”
Toto Reveals the Man Behind the Curtain
We have a lot to figure out. Yesterday, a student dropped by my office and told me that she had come across this blog. She then shared with me briefly how she and some of her peers had felt very uncomfortable and suddenly afraid to speak in their first-year classes because the comments and concerns that they had about the material were so different than what they were supposed to be thinking and talking about.
This blog is currently at the stage of identifying and defining the problem of why law students and lawyers do not thrive with respect to several indicia. But before this all becomes too morose, I want to cut to the chase and preview some of the very exciting and encouraging research that has been done on potential solutions to this problem.
“In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.”
Marcel Proust, quoted by Alain de Botton in How Proust Can Change Your Life at 12.
Previously, we learned about the overarching premise of Mertz’s 7 Propositions: that premise being that law school teaches students a way of knowing (an epistemology) by teaching students a common language that structures their view of the world, the people in it, and human conflict. On another level, legal language (what we read and how we learn to speak) structures the pursuit of the “right” answer, that is, the truth.
As previously explained, Elizabeth Mertz’s book, “The Language of Law School,” sets forth the results of her systematic study of the common language used at eight different law schools, by eight different professors, in teaching a first-year section of contracts.
