Benjamin Afton Cavanaugh (St. Mary's), The Next Generation Professional: An Opportunity to Reframe Legal Education to Center Student Wellness, 51 Hofstra L. Rev. 775 (2023):
“A law school shall maintain a rigorous program of legal education that prepares its students, upon graduation, for admission to the bar and for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession.”
Legal education has a serious design problem. The current rigorous design of legal education breeds depression, imposter syndrome, anxiety, and problems with substance abuse. The outcome of these issues is that too many graduates are not ready “for effective, ethical, and responsible participation as members of the legal profession” because their mental well-being is at an all-time low following graduation and preparation for the bar exam. Law schools across the nation need to undertake a self-evaluation of how to marry the rigor needed to prepare their students for law practice with the necessity of ensuring graduates leave the academic world with a strong sense of themselves as legal professionals and in a healthy state of mental wellness. This self-evaluation starts with being honest about how far programs geared at wellness can really go in resolving the impact the design of law school has on students.
The prevalence of mental health issues in law school continues despite the rise in programming and attempts by law schools to help law students incorporate thoughtful mental well-being planning into their day-to-day lives. Law schools take many different approaches to helping students maintain their well-being mentally; from wellness workshops, to mindfulness, yoga, classroom discussions, student events, and countless other resources, from before orientation through graduation students will be exposed to many different approaches to taking care of their mental health. Many of the programs and efforts of law schools in this arena are aimed at having students take on the work of ensuring they maintain their mental well-being; it is rare that a law school considers how their own approach to legal education might be contributing to the very issues they are trying to help students navigate.
These same mental health issues are commonplace in legal practice, and as law school is meant to prepare students for participation in the legal profession, in this regard law schools certainly are on track. In most instances, anyone stepping back and examining a system that drove higher rates of mental health issues would demand reform of that system. Yet, legal education is steeped in the idea of tradition. The methods of preparation have produced good lawyers for a time beyond most current law school professors and administrators. It is a system we are used to, a system we came through.
Part II of this Article discusses the design of legal education as a disease that law schools have largely focused on treating the symptoms of rather than doing the hard work of identifying the disease and seeking to cure it. Though the problems with legal education have long been discussed, this Article calls into questions the practice of treating the symptoms rather than addressing the problems head on. Part III examines two change agents—the American Bar Association’s (“ABA”) revisions to Standard 303 and the NextGen Bar Exam—as the drivers to finally identify the diseased aspects of the legal curriculum design and make changes with these looming shifts in mind.
Part IV presents an approach to evaluating and changing the first-year law school curriculum that centers student wellness. It lays out a path for law schools to adopt changes to the system of legal education that would shift the focus from treating symptoms of a bad design to resolving the bad design itself. Every law school has different considerations for their student population, a different mission, and different driving goals that should factor into such decisions. The purpose of this Article is not to suggest the method described is the only way forward, but to demonstrate how student wellness can be a core consideration in curriculum design. Thus, Part IV posits that the focus on molding law students for practice should rely on building well-being into the curriculum design rather than putting the onus totally on students to incorporate well-being into their professional identity formation.
