The Corrosive Effects of Law School

Chronicle of Higher Education Online
June 8, 2007

A glance at the current issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: The maddening effects of law school

Research suggests that law school has a corrosive effect on the well-being, values, and motivation of students, say Kennon M. Sheldon, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and Lawrence S. Krieger, a law professor at Florida State University. "Indeed, the emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times approach that of psychiatric populations," they write. Law schools can mitigate this phenomenon, they have found, by "enhancing their students' feelings of autonomy."

In a three-year study of two similar, unidentified law schools, the authors used questionnaires to measure the "subjective well-being" of students, their "need satisfaction," how motivated they were for a career in law, and their "perceived autonomy support." The authors also compared the grades of students at each institution.

"Students at both schools declined in psychological need satisfaction and well-being over the three years," write the authors. But, they note, students with a greater sense of autonomy support from faculty members experienced "less radical declines in need satisfaction," and that in turn was linked to "better well-being in the third year and also a higher grade-point average, better bar-exam results, and more self-determined motivation for the first job after graduation."

The problem with most law schools, the authors write, is that they place little emphasis on hiring faculty members with proven records of teaching excellence. Instead, they tend to "emphasize theoretical scholarship and the teaching of legal theory, and many hire and reward faculty primarily based on scholarly potential and production," say the authors. Observers suggest, they add, "that such priorities and processes train students to ignore their own values and moral sense, undermine students' sense of identity and self-confidence, and create cynicism."

A sense of autonomy is therefore critical for law students, they say, because "when authorities provide autonomy support and acknowledge their subordinates' initiative and self-directedness, those subordinates discover, retain, and enhance their intrinsic motivations and at least internalize nonenjoyable but important extrinsic motivations."

The article, "Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory," is temporarily available free through Sage Publications.