The Affective Assistance of Counsel: Practicing Law as a Healing Profession

This book is subversive. It aims to undermine the legal profession's prevailing gladiatorial paradigm. It is, to use Professor Leonard Riskin's phrase, something off "the lawyer's standard philosophical map." It promises a vision of practicing law that is very different than that taught in most American law schools. There exists tremendous discontent among the practicing bar. Many lawyers have found themselves unhappy or unfulfilled in their practices. Compared to other professionals, lawyers suffer disproportionately from excessive stress, substance abuse, and other emotional difficulties. Many find themselves demoralized or disillusioned about the practice of law. Here's the good news. Recent years have witnessed a spate of both new and renewed approaches to the practice of law. Disaffected by the adversarial model, many practitioners have engaged in a quiet revolution, a marriage of theory and practice designed to maximize the healing potential of the law. The result has been a variety of approaches such as Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Collaborative Law, and Creative Problem-Solving. Lawyers are cultivating Emotional Intelligence, Multicultural Competence, and Mindfulness. They are developing ways of working consistent with their spiritual and religious beliefs. New pedagogy is informing old courses, and new courses are evolving and taking their places in the curriculums of increasing numbers of law schools. This book bears the fruit of many of these efforts. The twenty contributors to this book come from widely diverse backgrounds. What they share are visions for more therapeutic, more beneficial, more helping, healing ways to practice law. This book is a resource for law professors, law students, and lawyers who share those visions.