How Lawyers Lose Their Way

A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds

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by Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado

Duke University Press

Due/Published March 2005, 152 pages, paper

ISBN 0822335638

In this book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use historical investigation and critical analysis to diagnose the cause of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression, divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly paid professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours, and intense pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and Delgado argue that these professional demands are only symptoms of a deeper problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and reason. They show how legal education and practice have been rendered arid and dull by formalism, a way of thinking that values precedent and doctrine above all, exalting consistency over ambiguity, rationality over emotion, and rules over social context and narrative.

Stefancic and Delgado dramatize the plight of modern lawyers by exploring the unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish, who gave up a successful but unsatisfying law career to pursue his literary yearnings, and Ezra Pound. Reading the forty-year correspondence between MacLeish and Pound, Stefancic and Delgado draw lessons about the difficulties of attorneys trapped in worlds that give them power, prestige, and affluence but not personal satisfaction, much less creative fulfillment. Long after Pound had embraced fascism, descended into lunacy, and been institutionalized, MacLeish took up his old mentor's cause, turning his own lack of fulfillment with the law into a meaningful crusade and ultimately securing Pound's release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. Drawing on MacLeish's story, Stefancic and Delgado contend that literature, public interest work, and critical legal theory offer tools to contemporary attorneys for finding meaning and overcoming professional dissatisfaction.

"Through the correspondence between the poet-lawyer-statesman Archibald MacLeish and the poet­modernist master Ezra Pound, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado brilliantly give expression to one of American law's central metaphors: our lawyers who have lost their way."--Lawrence Joseph, St. John's University School of Law and author of Before Our Eyes, a book of poetry

"Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado offer an innovative approach to integrating a great career in the law with an examined, moral life. The authors make profound connections between law and literature, scholarship and practice, and the personal and the political. The book is an exciting combination of a self-help manual and cutting-edge scholarship. Stefancic and Delgado write with the insight and creativity that they will certainly inspire in lawyers and others who choose careers hoping both to live well and to do some good in this world."--Paul Butler, George Washington University Law School

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Are Lawyers So Unhappy?

Part I
Panthers and Pinstripes
1. The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound
2. Pinstripes: Archibald MacLeish

Part II
Discontents
3. Formalism: A New/Old Disease
4 Lawyers and Their Discontents
5. Lawyers' Lives
6. Other Professions: Medicine
7. High-Paid Misery

Notes
Index