Lawyers and Happiness (And a Little Bit of Virtue Ethics)

Most of the lawyers I know are happy to be lawyers.  They take pride in their work, and they feel good about their role in the justice system.  Life as a lawyer isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding and fulfilling.

But it seems like there’s a perception that has intensified in the past decade or so that lawyers are miserable—that we feel alienated from the profession and that justice rarely plays a role in our tedious, all-consuming work.  There’s a stereotype of a “soulless” lawyer who works to pay off debt or make more money but who feels no satisfaction with the job.    I’m not sure how true this stereotype is (see above), but it’s prevalent and widely discussed.  (Raise the Bar:  Real World Solutions for a Troubled Profession is an interesting book published by the ABA that contains multiple essays exploring the “miserable lawyer” question.)  I want my law students to become lawyers who are happy in their chosen profession, and this blog seems as good a place as any to consider happiness and lawyering.

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Writing Is The Right Way To Go

Professor Fallone left a thoughtful comment on my last post, pointing out that Marquette goes farther in emphasizing practical lawyering skills than many of its peer institutions. I agree with him, and from my experience, one of the most important practical “lawyering skills” that is emphasized here at Marquette is legal writing and research. I consider myself fortunate to have been assigned to Professor Julien’s section of LAWR I my 1L year. Even though I still have nightmares about losing that Writing Bee shirt in the final round (thanks to the space I should have put between So. and 2d), in the end, I gained much more from her class than I lost.

We learned the basics — pronoun-antecedent agreement (her pet peeve), citation, punctuation, and CREAC. But we were taught something more that I will never be able to put a value on. Professor Julien helped us to become passionate about writing.  

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What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School, Part VI

Classes were cancelled on my first day of law school at Tulane due to the feared imminent arrival of Hurricane Andrew.  I had fled New Orleans the previous day in response to a plea from the city’s mayor, having seen the destruction that Andrew left behind in South Florida.  Since I hail from Wisconsin, land of sometimes tornadoes and many times blizzards — storms that could certainly be serious but had never required flight — initially I wasn’t sure how to respond to the mayor’s plea.  I knew the phone number of one person in New Orleans, a classmate I had met during orientation.  Her father found the closest hotel vacancy: a room in a B&B in Meridian, Mississippi.  So I shoved my Macintosh Plus desktop computer into a closet (we didn’t use laptops yet), grabbed my cat, and got in the car.  My cat, my new friend, and I watched a TV screen in a Meridian tavern as the Hurricane first strengthened, then moved farther west than the original projections had shown until it weakened and made landfall again far enough west of New Orleans to cause relatively minor damage there.  The city of New Orleans was spared (that time).

I arrived late to my first Civil Procedure class a day and a half later, after driving into the city through heavy welcome home traffic.  Civil procedure was as strange as the hurricane, with all of its foreign terminology, rules, and standards that seemed to have no place to sit in my prior learning of English and French literature, fiction writing, or environmental science.  I had made it back to New Orleans, but now I was really lost. 

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