HEALTH WEEK
Tuesday, October 27, 2015 11
The Whole-Brain Lawyer
L
grace yogaretnam › contributor
aw s t udent s mus t learn to
s teadfas tly defend client s’
interests and advance the public
good, all while upholding the
integrity of our legal system. Why must
we do these things? Because we will
take an oath, and in that oath, these twin
obligations — to clients and society as a
whole — are tantamount to one another,
rather than conflicting. Professional
integrity and competence then, require
that we hold them in the same esteem.
But there is a third duty, an unspoken
duty we have to ourselves that requires
equal stead. It is the discharge of this
third duty that equips us with the skills
we need to fulfill the totality of our
professional responsibilities. That duty is
to know and care for ourselves.
But, That’s Not What We Teach Students
There is an explicit and implicit curriculum in law
school. The explicit curriculum involves training in
legal research, persuasive writing, and oral argument. The implicit curriculum comes in the form of
things that are not spoken about but tolerated — sleep
deprivation, poor nutrition, a lack of physical activity, impersonal relationships, as well as the use of
stimulants and depressants. The most powerful
endorsement of self-abandoning responses to stress
manifests, not in the expectation that students meet
the demands of a legal education, but in the complete
omission of wellbeing practices that support students
in doing so, within the curriculum itself.
As a result, crucial life learning
about to how to
handle stress and
how to abide by
ethics and values
during stressful
times is privatized as “up to the student” or pathologized as necessary “only for those who suffer,” rather
than personalized in accord with the student’s psycho-spiritual beliefs and conceived of as the noble
work it is. The unintended lessons then, are in selfabandonment when confronted with stress, suppressing conscience as a response to injury and
shutting down awareness as a means of preserving
the status quo — all of which have implications for the
richness of our client advocacy and vibrancy of our
mental health.
ê The categories of right brain and left brain are signifiers - neither could truly operate without the other. The key is
to view the set of characteristics conferred by each side as the fulfillment of the other, rather than impediments to
the full expression of either.
Law Schools Are Not Alone
The entire liberal arts model of education has been
pushed through an ideological funnel so jagged and
narrow, that only professional training has spiraled
out the other end. What’s missing is instruction in
how to discover who you are, consciously choose the
values and ethics you will live by, and be true to yourself in the midst of life experiences that will actively
dissuade you from doing these three things. What’s
missing is an education in how to be a whole human
being.
Where have the humanities gone? Last year, North
Americans spent over forty billion dollars on personal
g row t h p ro ducts and services.
T h i s a stou nding statistic repr e s e n t s m a ny
things — a ffluence
and the commercialization of mentorship to start, but it also signifies
a mass effort to privately acquire the life skills we do
not learn as youth and must possess in order to thrive
as adults.
“...the art of lawyering involves
solving one problem without
creating another...”
Why Educate for Humanity?
In the absence of training in how to fulfill our
obligations as legal professionals, and in the
presence of competing pressures to abdicate nonfiduciary responsibilities, law students can begin
to unconsciously situate client interest at the top
of a hierarchy in which nothing else matters—be
it professional ethics, the public good, or their own
wellbeing.
That’s a problem because creating sustainable value
for our clients amidst the most dire economic, social,
and environmental challenges the world has ever
known, requires legal innovations that account for
multi-stakeholder interests — not only in negotiations
but in the form of new business models, technologies,
products, services, and political arrangements.
Lawyers without the capacity to draw on resources
such as empathy, creativity, and emotional resilience,
in addition to intellectual prowess, are unlikely to be
the source of that innovation.
In the language of economics, getting the
prices right, such that they reflect the full social,
environmental, and financial costs of production — is
necessary to bring the best products to market.
When prices are inaccurate, inferior products persist.
Similarly, seeing things as they really are, rather than
as we’d prefer they be or always assumed they were, is
a necessary quality of mind for creating laws and legal
practices that best serve society’s needs. This is not
to say there is no demand for ruthlessly adversarial
lawyering, only that there is also a demad for holistic
approaches to conf Ɩ7B&W6