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- We do not sufficiently encourage law students to balance their drive to be at “the top” with the understanding that being at “the top” does not assure a fine life, but many who are not at “the top” actually lead better lives.
- Unyielding devotion to excessive hours of work, seen as a preparatory habit for law firm employment, or leading the life of an attorney, leads to illogical workaholism and loss of health and comfort in working lives.
- Abusive work-environments are not glorifying, and all those elegant offices and brass doorknobs cannot make up for the time you lose overworking for others. You are expected to provide service for money, but without doing a disservice to yourself or to your family.
- There is much more to a good life than constant achievement of goals and completion of tasks.
- Law students need to realize that they can live like humans if they act according to their personal values, conscience and ideals.
- Silencing personal ethics in favor of analysis and ‘objectivity’ is expected of killers, not of lawyers.
- Analytical skills and substantive knowledge is important, but not to the extent that it should subsume one’s personality.
- Study of law is useless if you constantly allow it to consume and subjugate your subjective life – your personal time, family time, emotional intimacy with your near and dear ones.
- Shallowness, greed and dishonesty adorn the common caricatures of lawyers because law students allow the pressure of syllabi, and false notions about career to severe their connection with their inner feelings and sense of self
- Most successful lawyers were neither at at top of the class, nor on law reviews to attain success in working lives
- Participation in adversarial process should not be misconstrued as an imperative to prevail at all costs
- Outcome of specific cases ‘influence’ success and reputation, but they do not ‘determine’ them.
- The best personal attributes of law students are more important than their best skills or performances.
- Who you are is more important than how you do something.
As Krieger says, “law students often manifest extreme concern over how they may appear to or compare with others (including how their performance reflects on them). It is interesting to note that, of all the psychological scales reported in the Beck/Sales study, attorneys displayed the highest incidence of dysfunction in the area of "interpersonal sensitivity" a measure of insecurity specifically focused on the need to compare one's self with others. An astounding 35% of the responding attorneys were found to be distressed to the "clinical" level on this scale. One manifestation of this phenomenon may be the self-inflating posturing not uncommon among lawyers (and law students)--a sort of egotism that results from the sense that one needs to be better than others. In contrast, genuine self-esteem involves the sense that one is inherently good, without comparison with or reference to others, and regardless of whether one committed palpable errors that day.”
Reference:
Lawrence S. Krieger, "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," Journal of Law and Health 13.1 (1998)
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