How Lawyers Lose Their Way

Stefancic Jean Stefancic, Delgado Richard Delgado

Description

In this penetrating book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use historical investigation and critical analysis to diagnose the cause of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression, divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly paid professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours, and intense pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and Delgado argue that these professional demands are only symptoms of a deeper problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and reason. They show how legal education and practice have been rendered arid and dull by formalism, a way of thinking that values precedent and doctrine above all, exalting consistency over ambiguity, rationality over emotion, and rules over social context and narrative.Stefancic and Delgado dramatize the plight of modern lawyers by exploring the unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish, who gave up a successful but unsatisfying law career to pursue his literary yearnings, and Ezra Pound. Reading the forty-year correspondence between MacLeish and Pound, Stefancic and Delgado draw lessons about the difficulties of attorneys trapped in worlds that give them power, prestige, and affluence but not personal satisfaction, much less creative fulfillment. Long after Pound had embraced fascism, descended into lunacy, and been institutionalized, MacLeish took up his old mentor's cause, turning his own lack of fulfillment with the law into a meaningful crusade and ultimately securing Pound's release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. Drawing on MacLeish's story, Stefancic and Delgado contend that literature, public interest work, and critical legal theory offer tools to contemporary attorneys for finding meaning and overcoming professional dissatisfaction.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 13 janvier 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386865
• Langue: English

Extrait

how lawyers lose their way

j e a n s t e f a n c i c a n d r i c h a r d d e l g a d o

How Lawyers Lose Their Way

a p r o f e s s i o n f a i l s i t s c r e a t i v e m i n d s

Duke University Press

Durham and London

2005

∫2005 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by CH Westmoreland Typeset in Bembo

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Stefancic, Jean. How lawyers lose their way : a profession fails its creative minds / Jean Stefancic, Richard Delgado. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-8223-3454-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn0-8223-3563-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Practice of law—United States— Psychological aspects. 2. Lawyers—job satisfaction—United States. I. Delgado, Richard. II. Title. kf300.s340698 2005 %.023%73—dc22 2004015808

Invent the age, invent the metaphor.

Without a credible structure of law

a society is inconceivable.

Without a workable poetry no society

can conceive a man.

—Archibald MacLeish,

Apologia(1972)

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?

part I Panthers and Pinstripes 3 1. The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound 5 2. Pinstripes: Archibald MacLeish 12

part I I Discontents 31 3. Formalism: A New/Old Disease 33 4. Lawyers and Their Discontents 47 5. Lawyers’ Lives 62 6. Other Professions: Medicine 72 7. High-Paid Misery 77

Notes Index

87 135

x

i

Acknowledgments

We drafted major portions of this book at three residential centers: the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities of the Bogliasco Foun- dation in Bogliasco, Italy; the Centrum Creative Residency Program in Port Townsend, Washington; and the Center for Social Justice of the University of California School of Law in Berkeley. In Italy we gratefully acknowledge the support and inspiration of the center’s sta√, particularly Anna Maria Quaiat, Ivana Folle, and Alan Rowlin, and of Professor Mas- simo Bacigalupo of the University of Genoa. The residential fellows David Young, Robert Hahn, Nicole Rafter, Janine Massard, Max Koslo√, and Joyce Koslo√ made our stay lively and memorable. At Centrum, we thank Sally Rodgers and a supportive sta√ for enabling us to spend a month in exhilarating surroundings. Thanks as well to Mary Louise Frampton and the sta√ of the Center for Social Justice for a residency in fall 2003, which enabled us to complete the final stages of this book, and to Clark Smith, who encouraged us to write it in the first place. The University of Colorado Law School, Dean Harold Bru√, and the University of Pittsburgh Law School, Dean David Herring, provided steadfast and generous support over several years. At Pittsburgh the Docu- ment Technology Center under the direction of LuAnn Driscoll prepared the manuscript with intelligence and dispatch. Two law students, Anna Fredericksen-Cherry and Andrea Wang, now members of the bar, read the manuscript and provided feedback and suggestions on sections dealing with legal education. Jillian Lloyd and Marla Kerr researched sections concerning two professions. We benefited greatly as well from the support and assistance of the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, and the Beinecke Library at Yale for giving us access to unpublished material from their Pound and MacLeish collections. In Italy, the Biblioteca Internazionale, Città di Rapallo: International