Book Review: Law-Induced Anxiety: Legists, Anti-Lawyers and the Boredom of Legality
| Author | Peter Goodrich |
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900107 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REVIEW ARTICLE
LAW-INDUCED ANXIETY:
LEGISTS, ANTI-LAWYERS AND
THE BOREDOM OF LEGALITY
PETER GOODRICH
Cardozo School of Law, New York, USA
PAUL F. CAMPOS, PIERRE SCHLAG AND STEVEN D. SMITH,
Against the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, x + 277pp.,
$59.95 (hbk), $19.95 (pbk).
PAUL CAMPOS, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998, xii + 198pp., £10.99 (pbk), £16.99 (hbk).
DAVID SAUNDERS, Anti-Lawyers. Religion and the Critics of Law and
State. London: Routledge, xii + 183pp., $85.00 (hbk).
PIERRE SCHLAG, Laying Down the Law: Mysticism, Fetishism, and the
American Legal Mind. New York: New York University Press. 1996, x +
195pp., $16.50 (pbk), $45.00 (hbk).
PIERRE SCHLAG, The Enchantment of Reason. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1998, 176pp., $49.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper).
A recent survey of empirical research into the mental health of American
lawyers both begins and concludes with the unequivocal view that there is
a crisis in the profession (Daicoff, 1997). Certainly the statistics presented
from studies conducted over the past 25 years are forbidding. Using stan-
dard indicators of clinical depression, levels of psychiatric distress amongst
pre-law students were found to be only marginally higher than the mean for
the population at large. During the course of law school, levels of anxiety,
depression, phobia, paranoia and other symptoms of psychological distress
were found to peak in the second year of law school (44 per cent) and then
to level out (19 per cent) at over twice that of the national average (3–9 per
cent) (Daicoff, 1997: 1375–8). At least since 1970, 20 per cent of law students
have experienced extreme dissatisfaction with their studies and ‘very strong
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200003) 9:1 Copyright © 2000
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 9(1), 143–163; 011677
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(1)
tendencies towards alienation’ (p. 1383), as well as dependency upon mal-
adaptive coping mechanisms such as alcohol and substance abuse. Using
Kohlberg’s (disputed) typology of stages of moral development, law
students also tended to regress in ethical terms during law school (p. 1398).
The figures for depression, alcoholism and drug dependency amongst
practising lawyers are similar to those for graduating law students. Surveys
from the 1980s indicated that levels of depression amongst the profession (20
per cent) are well over twice the average – in one study four times the average
(Eaton, 1990) – and the rate of alcoholism is also roughly double that of the
rest of the population. According to another survey, over 70 per cent of
lawyers develop alcohol problems over the course of their lifetime (Beck et
al., 1995–1996: 51), and up to 75 per cent of disciplinary complaints against
lawyers involve alcohol or substance abuse (Sells, 1994: 189). Other studies
have indicated that lawyers are prone to workaholism, obsessive compulsive
behaviour, hostility, interpersonal insensitivity, isolation and failed relation-
ships. In sum, a disproportionate number of lawyers experience low levels of
satisfaction with their work and are prone to addiction, as well as to
emotional dysfunction and mental illness.
The statistics on lawyers’ mental health reported by Daicoff do not differ-
entiate between different classes or categories of legal subject and so tend to
suggest an amorphous uniformity of malaise across the race, gender and class
divides of legal subjectivity. More recent studies of race (Mertz et al., 1998)
and gender (Guinier et al., 1997) in American law schools, as well as the elab-
oration of feminist jurisprudence and critical race theory, suggest that
growing levels of depression and maladaption may well in large measure
reflect the dissatisfaction and alienation experienced by women and ethnic
minorities joining the profession in increasing numbers. Guinier’s study cer-
tainly confirms earlier findings that women in law schools are ‘alienated’ by
the method of teaching, ‘feel excluded from the formal educational process’,
are excluded from the informal educational environment and significantly
underperform in terms of grades. Indeed, with respect to the last point, a
crucial indicator of career trajectory in the US law school, ‘men are three
times more likely than women to be in the top ten per cent of their law school
class’ (Guinier et al., 1997: 28). Other studies similarly indicate that women
in law school feel disempowered (Granfield, 1992) and that this estrange-
ment, and a sense of powerlessness and dissatisfaction continue into their
professional life (MacCrate, 1992: 22). Mertz’s study of difference in the class-
room supports the finding that gender significantly affects law school experi-
ence and also tentatively suggests that race isolates and marks out minority
students as exceptions to the norm (Mertz et al., 1998: 85). In more general
terms the professional persona of the lawyer, as modeled in law school and
acted out publically, reflects a relatively homogeneous and stable norm that
has yet to incorporate or accommodate the multiple identities, experiences
and languages of gender and racial diversity.1
If even the white male archetype of legal professional identity suffers from
disproportionate proneness to depression, it is clearly the case that the
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emotional and psychic malaise or déformation professionelle of lawyers offers
and will continue to offer significant work for conventional mental health
specialists, as also for occupational therapists and psychoanalysts. Susan
Daicoff, for example, suggests that the statistics indicate a ‘crisis of profes-
sionalism’ (Daicoff, 1997: 1340) that is damaging to the public image of the
lawyer and is best addressed by better vocational matching of personality
type to career choice. In a similarly adaptive vein, the therapist Benjamin Sells
proposes psychological changes in the mode of legal practice and in particu-
lar a more imaginative or ‘soulful’ approach to the work of law (Sells, 1994:
179). Anthony Kronman, to take a final related example, rails at a more
abstracted level about the loss of the ideal of the lawyer-statesman and argues
in essence for a return to the types and virtues of a bygone age (1993: 364).
The malady or distress of lawyers is seen generically as a problem of subjec-
tive disidentification with the professional role, rather than as a sign of insti-
tutional sclerosis or of a failure of the profession to accommodate the novel
ideals and identities of new and more diverse entrants to the profession, as
well as an inability to respond to new and changing domains and knowledges
of regulation. Few, in other words, have dared to address directly the alterna-
tive possibility that the increasing degree of suffering, of anxiety and dys-
function in the lives of lawyers, is not so much a question of image
management and personal adaptation, of restoring old ideals or finding new
faiths, as it is a symptom of structural changes in the composition, social place
and role of law.
It is the latter more radical argument that forms the focus of an emerging
school of legal thought recently dubbed ‘against the law’ (French, 1996: 433)
or, less schematically, of a growing body of critical jurisprudential literature.
While it is hard to put a name to a literature that ranges in theme from modest
assertions of legal agnosticism, through conspectuses of the madness of con-
temporary law, to critiques of normativity and reason as such, there is a dis-
cernible commonality of tone and telos that marks this current turn in legal
theory. Simply taking the titles of the leading works, Laying Down the Law
(Schlag, 1996), Against the Law (Campos et al., 1996), Jurismania (Campos,
1998), and The Enchantment of Reason (Schlag, 1998), there is immediately a
striking mix of what could be termed ‘heavy signifiers’ (Schütz, 1998: 200) and
semantic ambivalence or ambiguity. Each title suggests both hostility and
affection, distance and proximity to law. ‘Laying down the law’ ironically sug-
gests patristic acts of legislation as well as a call to give up lawyering. At the
further extremes of connotation, ‘laying down the law’ also has implications
of sexual intercourse and of ‘sleeping with the law’. ‘Against the law’, like
Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’, implies both opposition to law and a more
proximate leaning up against or even dependence upon law. In either event,
like atheism, ‘against the law’ defines itself by reference to the object it seeks
to erase and in that sense is negatively attached to and so identified by law.
The ambivalence of jurismania needs even less critical appreciation: the notion
of legal mania suggests both a bacchanalian celebration of law, a hedonistic or
wild desire for legality, as well as the suffering of the addict or juraholic. The
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enchantment of (legal) reason perhaps best captures the ambiguity of the the-
matic. Legal reason, understood here as a form of mythopoietics, as a narra-
tive of myth, as literary fiction or collective fantasy, ensnares and seduces: the
law becomes a state of trance, an occult phenomenon whose charms are the
product in equal measure of debilitating fear and misplaced desire.
The ambivalence or the ironic and at times parodic tone of this new legal
...
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