Below the break is an excerpt from “Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory” by Kennon M. Sheldon (University of Missouri–Columbia) and Lawrence S. Krieger (Florida State University), which was published only a few months ago in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 6, 883-897 (2007).
Law school is a social psychological gauntlet for law students in general. Imagine what it is like for minority law students who are not very Euro-Americentric, especially Afrocentric or quasi-Afrocentric African Americans. Keep in mind that the data and statistical analyses this paper is based on were not collected or analyzed for the purposes of enabling the authors to examine lower-class and lower-middle-class African American students’ unique psychological challenges related to cultural discomfort (see Cultural Discomfort and Cultural Discomfort II) or the psychological challenges that result from one’s hyper-minority status in very competitive social environments (see Hyper-Minorities and Academic Performance).
I believe the authors’ arguments in this popular scholarly paper should help make my arguments in Cross-Cultural Wisdom & Elite Law School Admissions Decisions Algorithms even more persuasive.
Hat tip to the enigmatic, often discomforting, ocassionally quasi-subversive, and almost-always-worth-reading Supremacy Claus for reminding me of this paper in “Toxic Effects of Law School.”
Implications for Legal Education
These results suggest that, to maximize the learning and emotional adjustment of its graduates, law schools need to focus on enhancing their students’ feelings of autonomy. Why? Because such feelings can have trickledown effects, predicting changes in students’ basic need satisfaction and consequent psychological well-being, effects that may also carry forward into the legal career. Given the excessive incidence of depression among practicing lawyers (Beck et. al., 1995; Eaton et. al., 1990) and the likely negative spillover of that phenomenon to society and the justice system (Benjamin et. al., 1986; Hess, 2002; Krieger, 1998, 2005; McKinney, 2002), these findings may have substantial practical importance.
Autonomy support also predicted (via need satisfaction) what many would consider the most important outcome of all—final law school GPA. Of course, incoming GPA and LSAT, as expected, had their own predictive effects for law school GPA. However, our data indicate that perceived autonomy support and psychological need satisfaction, although more subjective than GPA and LSAT, are just as critical in that they predict performance independently of these more objective indicators. Indeed, despite the equivalence of academic predictors, the school populations differed markedly in their Multi-State Bar Examination results in ways that would be predicted from our findings of institutional differences in reported autonomy support and need satisfaction.
Finally, institutional autonomy support also predicted a third key outcome: students’ self-determined motivation to begin their careers. This is important because a person’s initial motivation within a new context (i.e., the first job) can determine whether he or she thrives over time (Sheldon et al., 2003). The current findings suggest that the motivation-dampening effects of law school may indeed have negative effects that extend well beyond graduation. These effects are also consistent with recent commentators’ claims that there are major problems in the legal profession (Daicoff, 1997; Schiltz, 1999). Of course, much longer term longitudinal studies are required to confirm these potential connections.
How, then, to transform institutional cultures for the better? This is a complex question. Given our findings that greater autonomy support predicted improved need satisfaction, subjective well-being, and motivation for career, and may have led to enhanced learning and bar performance as well, schools would be well served to evaluate how they can best consider the priorities of their students and provide choices consistent with those priorities. We would expect, for example, that students are generally seeking quality teaching and that they attend law school to learn to practice law. However, law schools traditionally emphasize theoretical scholarship and the teaching of legal theory, and many hire and reward faculty primarily based on scholarly potential and production. Our findings suggest that schools will benefit from reevaluating faculty priorities regarding such issues and from considering carefully the effect of their teaching methods and practices on students. Changes toward employing faculty with more teaching and lawyering (including public service) experience, offering a balance of practical skills training, or providing more training and rewards for teaching excellence might also ultimately enhance students’ sense of autonomy and engagement. Can autonomy-support teaching itself be taught? Yes—for example, Reeve and colleagues have shown that even formerly controlling teachers can be trained to better support the autonomy of their students and provide them subsequent benefits (Reeve, 1998; Reeve, Jang, Carrell, Jeon, & Barch, 2004).