What We're Not Telling Law Students - And Lawyers - That They Really Need to Know: Some Thoughts-in-Action Toward Revitalizing the Profession from Its Roots

I. INTRODUCTION The current state of the legal profession confirms my personal lessons as a law student, litigation attorney, and clinical law teacher:(3) students are not told in law school what they really need to know to have meaningful and healthful lives as lawyers. Unfortunately and to the contrary, it also seems to me that some of the things many of us do learn in law school--largely from the culture rather than the curriculum--affirmatively contribute to the many problems facing the profession and its practitioners today. (4) It is hardly debatable any longer that the profession and its practitioners are suffering broadly from many serious problems. Indeed, studies have concluded that lawyers and law students are much more likely than the general population to experience emotional distress, depression, anxiety, addictions, and other related mental, physical, and social problems. (5) These studies confirm the common experience of student distress during law school, the negative public perception of lawyers, and simple observation of attorney behavior: lawyers as a group tend to be stressed and relatively unhappy people. (6) A particularly striking study by psychologists Beck, Sales, and Benjamin found that, on a variety of psychological scales, from 20% to 35% of attorneys are "clinically distressed" (which the authors define as "in need of professional help"). (7) These levels of distress are found in only about 2% of the general population,(8) and indicate that a very large number of attorneys are indeed living the appearance of a good life but the reality of misery. Many commentators call for law schools to address these matters directly. (9) This article offers a unifying, and hopefully clarifying, theory on many of these problems, my approach to presenting and reinforcing this theory for students and attorneys, and early indications that this approach is effective. Since becoming a law teacher, I have been struck by the number of law students I see exhibiting tension and personal malaise reminiscent of that which I, and many others I have known, have experienced as students and attorneys. After a few years of observing the particularly persistent performance anxiety in my classes, it struck me that Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Human Needs,"(10) commonly taught in undergraduate psychology courses, might explain the tension I was seeing. I also began to see that the Hierarchy, in combination with basic concepts from addiction theory, might help us understand many of the current problems in the profession. Could the dissatisfaction, distress, and lack of decent behavior among attorneys be understood, in essence, as manifestations of our collective inability to grow beyond the immature levels of psychological functioning which Maslow labeled "lower needs" in his motivation theory? (11) I sensed that this analytical framework could take my classes beyond the sense of lecturing and moralizing that attends much of our efforts to encourage professionalism, and prove practically useful to students and lawyers for a variety of reasons. First, it describes the natural process of human growth toward fulfillment--precisely the quality apparently most lacking in student and attorney life. Second, the theory can explain concerns of immediate relevance to most listeners--including anxiety, incivility, excessive competitiveness, and personal dissatisfaction--as reflections of immature levels of human development. I thought that the very nature of such a perspective would motivate students and practitioners to disfavor these negative qualities (rather than accept them as inevitable concomitants of their association with the law) and to "grow up" into the mature states of adult life described by Maslow's work. (12) Further study of Maslow's work brought another level of potential usefulness to my attention: his description of self-actualizing people--the healthiest and most mature subjects he could find--describes as well the highly professional attorneys we aspire to train or become. …