188. The learnedly unhappy profession

The ABA tells us: "A study in Washington and Arizona found 19 percent of lawyers suffer from alcoholism, and another 3 percent are addicted to cocaine and other drugs—a cumulative 22 percent rate of addiction."  The article continues: "These numbers are staggering."    The Oklahoma Bar pegs the addiction rate at 15%, while the Ohio Bar says it rises to 25% after 20 years in practice (insert rude Cleveland joke here) (or, perhaps, Oklahoma Baptist joke ...).

One theory is that the high rate of substance abuse in the profession is related to lawyers being constantly bombarded with depressing statistics about the profession.  Another theory, which I first encountered in a Steven Brill column in American Lawyer probably about 18 years ago, is that the sort of people who do exceptionally well in biology class get streamed into medical school at a young age.  But the sort of people who do exceptionally well in English and history get streamed into ...

Well, if they're smart and lucky, or find a sympathetic mentor, or have a real gift for brown-nosing, they might get to spend four years teaching undergraduates for almost enough money to pay the interest on their student loans.  At some point in their grad school careers, they look up from grading English 101 papers long enough to realize that the only well-paid profession in which their skills of research, writing and passing oral exams might actually be useful is ...  (Cue the quavering violins and cut to picture of sinister clouds scudding across the full moon.) 

So a whole bunch of bright, high-achieving people, used to being the best in the class at whatever they do, wind up in a field they have essentially no interest in.  No wonder studies show law students start the first year in a relatively normal state of mind, and finish it with rates of depression several times the national average.

Of course, there might be a connection to the fact that the law is the only profession in which entering students are subject to hazing by the teachers.  They can tell us it's the Socratic method all they want, but they still don't remind anyone of Socrates.  It's ritual abuse - hazing by another name.

My first-year contracts teacher at the University of New Mexico, where I began law school,  liked to ask, "Clear as mud?  Good."  He told us "consideration" was such a difficult concept that we would have to wait for an advanced class to approach it.  Now, for those spared the misery of first-year contracts classes, I can tell you that "consideration" means nothing at all except giving something of value in exchange for value received.  It's what distinguishes a sale from a gift.   The concept takes longer to explain than to grasp.  The teacher was just bullying us, enlisting us as unwilling extras in his private fantasy life, the one in which he possessed a formidable intelligence.

Years later the professor went into private practice in Albuquerque.  I knew a lawyer who briefly worked for him.  She said he was constantly upset with her either for (1) doing things without permission, or (2) failing to anticipate what he wanted her to do.  If she turned right, she should have turned left.  If she looked up, she should have looked down.  After a short and no doubt depressing time, she realized she was living in a permanent first-year contracts class, a hell remarkably similar to that imagined by Flann O'Brien in The Third Policeman.

But after hearing a talk by the phenomenal saxophonist James Carter - who can do everything that's ever been done with a saxophone, and quite a bit more besides (he channels Hendrix through his tenor) - I think I may have found another theory about the chronic unhappiness of so many lawyers.

Carter said that he believed there was no divide between music and life.  They are one and the same.  Lawyers, by contrast, are trained to think in categories, to slice up reality into chunks.  Most legal argument isn't reasoning, although judges call it that, but categorization: the issue is not this, but that.  The important fact isn't that, but this.  (See post 137.)  The lawyer's job is to argue on behalf of others, which means trying to be convincing even when saying what we don't believe, or even know is false.  (See post 180.)  None of it has much to do with real life.

The best advice I received as a young associate was to leave my professional skills at the office.  When you catch yourself cross-examining your spouse, you've got problems.  So does your spouse, but his/her problem requires only another lawyer's touch to solve.

Listening to Carter, a genuine musical genius who also comes across as both funny and approachable, it occurred me to that perhaps the deliberate dis-integration of the legal life, the consciously-willed submergence of identity, might go a long way to explain all those pickled lawyer livers.