Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy? - Lawyers With Depression: "Thus, pessimists are losers on many fronts. But there is one glaring exception: Pessimists do better at law. We tested the entire entering class of the Virginia Law School in 1990 with a variant of the optimism-pessimism test. These students were then followed throughout the three years of law school. In sharp contrast with the results of prior studies in other realms of life, the pessimistic law students on average faired better than their optimistic peers. Specifically, the pessimist outperformed more optimistic students on the traditional measures of achievement, such as grade point averages and law journal success."
'via Blog this'
4 comments:
Do you consider yourself a pessimist?
I don't know if I'd call myself a "pessimist" but I definitely think I've become more pessimistic or, at least, skeptical. And I agree with the article that a large part of lawyering is looking for where things will go wrong and trying to plan for them. Or trying to find flaws in your or your opposing counsel's arguments.
I sometimes wish there was more skepticism in the world. I, for one, doubt at any new establishing a novel finding, especially if the study is not a controlled study and if it conflicts with my aprior reasoning. I just do not believe our tools for teasing out cause and effect are very good under those conditions.
I remember one of the first briefs I wrote was kind of an eye-opener in this regard. I read the brief, and particularly its citation to authority, and started to felt anxious because I found the brief persuasive. I talked to my managing partner about it, and asked what I should argue, and wondering whether I should go through all the authority. His response was kind of like, obviously, yes. So I went through the authority and--shockingly--found that many of citations portrayed the cases inaccurately. Now I would never take a citation on faith, but at the time, it just didn't occur to me that a lawyer would be less than accurate when quoting material to the court.
On the down-side, when you convert to this way of looking at the world, you start to feel a little at sea. That is because a person can doubt almost any premise or fact. It'd be nice if a person could confine the way of thinking to work, and turn it off at other times, but that doesn't really seem possible. Especially when your skepticism leads you to discover that, even when a person is not lying outright, often times he is being less than candid.
It has me thinking a lot about the relationship between faith and evidence. Faith, as defined in Hebrews, is the virtue of believing something is true without evidence--or at least without a critical mass of evidence. It's the exact opposite of what we expect in court, which is definitive proof.
And yet there is something liberating and uplifting about faith and, in contrast, something depressing about requiring concrete proof.
Maybe it's not exactly the same as law school, but I think that academia in general fosters critical thinking that can lead to a skeptical outlook.
I feel I suffer from the same malady at times (though in the sense that I think "things will work out in the end" I consider myself pretty optimistic). Whenever I read an article about educational research (or any social science for that matter) my need jerk reaction is to think that it is garbage. I think this also tends to make me less committal when it comes to politics or even macro economics. Most theories are based on idealized situations (something that is the bread and butter of physics) that can certainly inform real world situations, but don't usually give nice clean answers.
Regarding faith, I feel my faith came easier when I was younger. Now it takes a bit more work. I've come to realize that at some point faith is a choice that we make.
"And yet there is something liberating and uplifting about faith and, in contrast, something depressing about requiring concrete proof."
Agreed. A world of pure science/logic is a meaningless one.
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