Thread by @inspiredcat

This article by @kathrynemyoung considers the upstream causes of the decline in mental health that starts in law school.

Prof. Young talked to law students to discover and document the changes they experienced in motivation, happiness, hopefulness & overall mental health 👇

during 1L in law school.

"Students enter law school with unexceptional psychological profiles: on average, they are no more or no less happy or healthy than demographically similar peers who are not in law school."

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"But by graduation, they emerge less intrinsically motivated, less hopeful, and less happy. On top of this, they carry new mental health problems."

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"One in ten physically self-harms, one in six has clinically diagnosable depression, one in three has clinical anxiety, and one in four has developed alcohol dependence."

"In more ways than one, it would seem, law school makes students into lawyers."

Knowing this, @kathrynemyoung focuses on the structural aspects of legal education that contribute to this dangerous and rapid shift in mental health among law students.

Because the “seed[ing] of unhappiness, poor mental health, inequality, professional dissatisfaction, and other problems that plague practicing attorneys are sown in law school.”

Everyone in legal ed should read @kathrynemyoung's article.

And,

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instead of simply telling law students to meditate and seek therapy, leaders in legal education should reflect deeply on the structural, upstream causes of mental unwellness in the legal profession—that start in law school.

And commit to change.

Article: bit.ly/3cXqrlU

From her interviews with law students, @kathrynemyoung identifies 3 primary harmful social processes prevalent in the law school experience:

1-how tension between the law school classroom & outside world hinders role integration

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2-how the curve damages professional socialization:

"As long as students are graded against one another, as opposed to against a set of criteria that allow more of them to succeed (or to fail), we reinforce what Susan Sturm has termed the 'gladiator' model of legal education 👇

which values competition over problem-solving.43 And until we eradicate this zero-sum model of assessing law students’ academic performance, law schools’ attempts to build community, social solidarity, and interdependence are doomed to ring hollow."

"Students’ sense of academic self-efficacy—the sense that they have the ability to exert control over outcomes—is significantly diminished when grades are curved."

"Self-efficacy is important to students’ ability to master new concepts."

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"It guards against the kinds of mental health problems that disproportionately plague law students and lawyers, including depression, anxiety, and substance addiction. Self-efficacy also makes people into more effective lawyers."

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The 3rd social process with harmful outcomes:

3-Subtle (and not-so-subtle) manifestations of race and gender inequality in the classroom

"Accounts like Greta’s, Lupe’s, Frances’s, and Violet’s were common, particularly among women of color.

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They illustrate the myriad ways spaces that may seem innocuous to white people, and/or to men, are rife with
interactions that lend social meaning to their law school experiences. And these experiences shape them as professionals—

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creating patterns, norms, and interaction styles that persist into legal practice. In isolation, these accounts might seem like small incidents or minor complaints.

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Taken together, they illustrate the power of the law school classroom to sow seeds of inequality in the legal profession and to reinforce patterns detrimental to lawyers’ wellbeing."

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"This Article demonstrates the value of detailing social processes at a granular level to understand what day-to-day experiences actually underlie the well documented changes that 1Ls undergo.

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Doing so is key to improving law schools as institutions and to building the strongest, healthiest, and most effective legal profession we can. Lawyers’ mental health has consequences not just for their own lives but for the lives of their clients as well."

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"Lawyers’ tendency toward anxiety, depression, and substance abuse 'begins in law school and eventually has an impact on society by affecting people who rely
on lawyers to manage their everyday legal problems.'"

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🔥 "The root cause of law student unwellness is not cranky old professors who refuse to 'change with the times'; rather, it is fidelity to a system’s longstanding structures even when those structures do not serve all students." 🔥

As @kathrynemyoung notes, law schools offer "remedial" training, to help students (often women of color) adapt to traditional pedagogy like cold calling.

"The problem with these remedial reforms is that they assume that the problem is not the system

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but rather the women’s problem with the system.
Instead of asking why we are choosing to rely so heavily on a pedagogy that creates disparate effects, we ask what is wrong with the students it disadvantages."

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"The mistake lies in seeing the pedagogy, not the students, as the nonmoving piece in the equation."

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"But the more transformative approach is a structural one: entertaining the possibility that if a pedagogical tool consistently produces negative results for certain people, perhaps the problem is with the tool, not
the people."

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"Legal education does not exist in some primordial ideal form. Instead of thinking about law school as having 'defaults' (e.g., cold calls, the curve) from which we should not stray without an extraordinarily good reason,

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we need to see legal education as a collection of structural choices we make every day. We create the social and institutional structure of law school through the administrative and pedagogical choices we make."

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"And it is up to us to create structures that
make our students into strong, healthy lawyers."

Legal education's structure is a CHOICE that we make. We can make better choices. That lead to better outcomes for students, our clients, and society.

bit.ly/3cXqrlU