Legal News

Is Lawyer Malaise Moving from the Firm to the Campus?

By Dan Slater

You may already have a vision of an exciting legal career waiting for you, but it may be clouded by your uncertainty about getting the necessary grades to land the job. . . .Your entire class shares the pressure to be in that exclusive Top Ten Percent (and to be invited to law review), and you all know that ninety percent of you cannot succceed in this endeavor. . . . If you allow these concerns to dominate your thinking, your studies are fraught with anxiety and unease about your worth . . . . — Lawrence Krieger, “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress”

Aside from some tedious blue-booking assignments, and perhaps a bit more reading than we would’ve cared for, the Law Blog didn’t find law school all that bad. A few hours of listening to entertaining professors; a few hours of studying (OK, a few-plus); and then the rest of the day is yours. Read a novel! Enjoy a pint or two with your section mates! Swim the Gowanus Canal! What’s not to like?

According to Florida State law prof Lawrence Krieger, we may’ve been deluding ourselves. “An institutional denial problem is alive and well,” says Krieger, author of “The Hidden Sources of Law School Stress.” Krieger’s pamphlet will be included in a forthcoming Mental Health Toolkit that the ABA Law Student Division intends to distribute to Student Bar Association presidents as part of a new initiative - a national mental health day for law students. (Here’s an NLJ story, and here’s the project’s website.)

“It is our hope that this will encourage law schools and students to confront some of the major mental health issues impacting our campuses and to erase the stigma faced by students coping with mental health problems,” said Daniel Suvor, a 3L at George Washington who heads the ABA law student division. “The Law Student Division is actively engaging schools to enhance their mental health programming to respond to this growing crisis.”

For the second time today, let’s turn to our LB friends on campus. Is law student depression a real problem?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).