Legal Education Commons^™

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

Articles

In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

Law Library Blog (March 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud: Defensive Pessimism In Legal Education, Emily Zimmerman, Casey Laduke

Catholic University Law Review

This Article presents the results of the first empirical research project to investigate law students’ use of defensive pessimism. Previous researchers have suggested that defensive pessimism may benefit law students academically. Defensive pessimism is a strategy that involves setting low expectations and reflecting extensively on what could go wrong in connection with a future event in order to manage anxiety and improve performance. However, up until now, law students’ use of defensive pessimism has not been empirically studied.

We investigated law students’ use of defensive pessimism. Contrary to the suggestions of other scholars, we did not find statistically significant relationships …

The Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse, Peter H. Huang, Corie Rosen Felder

Pepperdine Law Review

This article uses a popular cultural framework to address the near-epidemic levels of depression, decision-making errors, and professional dissatisfaction that studies document are prevalent among many law students and lawyers today. Zombies present an apt metaphor for understanding and contextualizing the ills now common in the American legal and legal education systems. To explore that metaphor and its import, this article will first establish the contours of the zombie literature and will apply that literature to the existing state of legal education and legal practice — ultimately describing a state that we believe can only be termed “the Zombie Lawyer …

The Transformative Potential Of Attorney Bilingualism, Jayesh M. Rathod

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In contemporary U.S. law practice, attorney bilingualism is increasingly valued, primarily because it allows lawyers to work more efficiently and to pursue a broader range of professional opportunities. This purely functionalist conceptualization of attorney bilingualism, however, ignores the surprising ways in which multilingualism can enhance a lawyer's professional work and can strengthen and reshape relationships among actors in the U.S. legal milieu. Drawing upon research from psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines, this Article advances a theory of the transformative potential of attorney bilingualism. Looking first to the development of lawyers themselves, the Article posits that attorneys who operate bilingually may, …