OPINION
8 Obiter Dicta
The Happy Law Student
Exploring the Paradox
-
cristina georgiana
This article is not for everyone. If you are looking for
an in-depth analysis of a Supreme Court case, or a
cover on how to secure that Bay Street interview,
move right along! If you are going to stay, however,
keep in mind that most of the generalizations made
here are meant to be illustrative of the greater point
and, really, it’s not that serious.
It has recently occurred to me that law students rarely, if ever, concern themselves with discussions about happiness. Whenever I speak to my
friends and colleagues about their aspirations in
law school and beyond, the word “success” is mentioned often, but the word “happiness” almost never.
It seems as though success has been conflated with
happiness in our context—or worse—that success
must be achieved even at the cost of happiness. With
the arrival of the first
law-school grades, this
mentality takes over
like a parasite, breedi n g e x p o n e n t i a l l y,
causing some students
to experience breakdow n s a nd ot hers
to work themselves beyond their means. It seems
bizarre to me, as it is common knowledge that a
career in law will take up most of our free time, that
we spend virtually no time discussing this important factor. Cliché or not, time is the most precious
thing we have. Shouldn’t we then turn our minds to
what it means to be happy, so that we may incorporate it into our potential legal careers? In Ethical
Lawyering in the Global Community, we learn how
to choose the kind of career that will benefit society, rather than only our pockets; we learn about
the rules and expectations of an ethical lawyer, yet
it is expected, it seems, that we have already learned
how to be happy.The happy law student is a paradox—an oxymoron. Everyone knows that if you are a
law student you must be miserable, always too busy
for your friends and family, and never have time
for anything other than things pertaining to your
future career. We come into law school with these
presuppositions and we live them out in the daily
law-related conversations that we have with others.
We laugh uncomfortably about how we are kind of
lonely, and then complain about how difficult it is to
manage a relationship alongside our law studies. We
rarely have constructive conversations with our colleagues or ourselves about how to balance our lives.
I am writing this because I believe there has to
be open communication in our hallways about
happiness. While conversations about mental
health, mental disorders, and depression are
indeed important to destigmatize—and have
great value for our community members—it is
disheartening to hear how easy it is for people
to say “I feel depressed,” yet never say “I figured out how to be happy, despite the pressure.”
I am now going to bore you with some philosophy. According to philosopher Wayne Sumner, who
has spent considerably more time than any of us
contemplating this subject, happiness is the authentically experienced and autonomously derived satisfaction with life. He claims that in order to be
happy, we not only should feel it manifesting cognitively, but also be able to look back at our lives in
aggregate, and claim that indeed, we lived a satisfying life. According to Sumner, no list of accomplishments, or objective definition can appraise
your life other than you, as happiness is something
that each person must subjectively and authentically evaluate. This is something that is often
forgotten in our hallways, as many events, collectives, and speakers orient students towards
equating success with having a career on Bay
Street, landing a summer job after 1L, and so on.
Operating under the assumption that most law
students are living authentic lives they have chosen
of their own free will, I am going to say a bit more
about feeling happiness cognitively. This goes
beyond just experiencing a string of joyful moments,
such as grabbing a
beer with a friend, or
finding out that you
have an interview at
a firm. It goes beyond
even having a happy
or cheerful disposition, though cultivating such an attitude might help. It means sensing
deep fulfillment by reflecting that our lives and
our expectations for our lives are not too far apart;
though this may not necessarily be as a result of what
might be commonly defined as “reaching