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Full-Text Articles in Law

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang Jan 2019

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students’ answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …


Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang Jan 2019

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students' answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …


How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang Jan 2015

How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Lawyers who behave unethically and unprofessionally do so for various reasons, ranging from intention to carelessness. Lawyer misconduct can also result from decision-making flaws. Psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath, in their best-selling book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, suggest a process to improve people’s decision-making. They introduce the acronym WRAP as the mnemonic for these decision-making heuristics: (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality-test your assumptions, (3) Attain distance before deciding, and (4) Prepare to be wrong. The WRAP process mitigates these cognitive biases: (1) narrow framing of a decision problem, (2) …


Awareness And The Legal Profession: An Introduction To The Mindful Lawyer Symposium, Leonard L. Riskin Dec 2014

Awareness And The Legal Profession: An Introduction To The Mindful Lawyer Symposium, Leonard L. Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

This article introduces the Mindfulness Symposium, which includes five articles that developed out of the Mindful Lawyer Conference held at U. California-Berkeley in 2010. The article explains mindfulness and its growing importance in the legal profession, situates it among other curricular innovations, summarizes the articles in the symposium, describes other mindfulness curriculum developments, and offers resources.


Awareness And The Legal Profession: An Introduction To The Mindful Lawyer Symposium, Leonard L. Riskin May 2012

Awareness And The Legal Profession: An Introduction To The Mindful Lawyer Symposium, Leonard L. Riskin

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article introduces the Mindfulness Symposium, which includes five articles that developed out of the Mindful Lawyer Conference held at U. California-Berkeley in 2010. The article explains mindfulness and its growing importance in the legal profession, situates it among other curricular innovations, summarizes the articles in the symposium, describes other mindfulness curriculum developments, and offers resources.


Happy Law Students, Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit, Douglas Linder Jan 2008

Happy Law Students, Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit, Douglas Linder

Nancy Levit

This article draws on research into the science of happiness and asks a series of interrelated questions: Whether law schools can make law students happier? Whether making happier law students will translate into making them happier lawyers, and the accompanying question of whether making law students happier would create better lawyers? After covering the limitations of genetic determinants of happiness and happiness set-points, the article addresses those qualities that happiness research indicates are paramount in creating satisfaction: control, connections, creative challenge (or flow), and comparisons (preferably downward). Those qualities are then applied to legal education, while addressing the larger philosophical …


Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel Jan 1999

Embracing Descent: The Bankruptcy Of A Business Paradigm For Conceptualizing And Regulating The Legal Profession, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Lawyers are said to travel in packs, or at least pairs, and in the popular parlance are often compared to hoards of locusts, herds of cattle, or unruly mobs. However, at least for purposes of assessing concerns with professionalism currently surrounding the bar and the public, whether attorneys are more or less social than other human animals does not matter. My point is simply that lawyers are social beings; like other human beings in social and occupational groups, lawyers behave largely in accordance with group norms, in much the same way peer pressure led Julian English toward juvenile delinquency in …