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Serota on Lawyer Satisfaction & the Law School Curriculum

By Lawrence Solum

Michael Serota (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) has posted Professional Values, Lawyer Satisfaction, and the Law School Curriculum: The Need for a Personal Constitution on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In this article, I argue that law schools fail to prepare students to face the personal challenges of lawyering because they do not emphasize the central role that personal values play in making career decisions. I then argue that this failure should be remedied through a required first-year course on professional satisfaction. Implementing a course that teaches law students how to approach the difficult professional decisions they must make in a manner that comports with their personal values would ameliorate the growing trend of lawyer dissatisfaction, producing happier law students, well-adjusted lawyers, and a more fruitful and impactful legal profession. It is incumbent upon law schools to stop ignoring the growing problem around them, and to address it.

I then provide a framework for teaching law students to make careers decisions based upon personal values: the personal constitution. Creating a personal constitution requires: (1) establishing a preamble by identifying one?s personal values as they relate to professional life as a lawyer; (2) creating the articles by identifying employment opportunities that correspond to this value system; and (3) amending the personal constitution over time as experience brings new insight to the relationship between personal values and professional life. I conclude by demonstrating how the personal constitution might be used to structure a class on professional satisfaction.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 05, 2010 (boomark / email).