Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Get a Life

My colleagues Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have published a provocative book about why so many lawyers are unhappy, and today's Post-Gazette includes their work in a little review of the legal profession. (The P-G has a related story here.)

The paper doesn't really get into the book's diagnosis, which connects lawyers' unhappiness to the intellectual aridity that pervades both the classroom and the law office: an obsession with analytic precision, formalistic legal reasoning, and consistency with precedent, and a detachment from the resources that we use to create meaning elsewhere in our lives -- social context, narrative, ambiguity and complexity. It's a terrific book and it's available at fine bookstores everywhere.

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