Wellness in Legal Education

This course is designed to introduce aspiring lawyers to balancing the challenges of legal education and practice with maintain balance and wellness in their lives. The course will include a combination of lecture, discussion, written materials, and interactive group exercises. Ideally, we will meet in person, but the course could also be offered online or in a hybrid format. Students will read and discuss literature reviewing physical and mental health challenges facing law students and lawyers as well as research on the unhealthy coping mechanisms (from alcohol abuse to self-harm) lawyers disproportionately engage in to try to address their stress. The bulk of our class meetings will be spent discussing literature and then practicing actual techniques that promote wellbeing, decrease stress, and manage ongoing challenges students likely encounter already and will continue to deal with as future attorneys. The goal of this course it to introduce students to positive and healthy ways to manage the mental and physical health challenges facing many law students and lawyers. By introducing aspiring lawyers to likely challenges they'll face and healthy ways to cope with them, I hope to inspire law students to consider how they can achieve greater balance and wellness in their lives, now and into the future as attorneys. Topics covered would be those most relevant to achieving balance and wellness as our students enter the legal profession. I envision this course as starting with foundational classes where we lay the groundwork for the weeks to come, covering the many challenges practicing lawyers face and the importance of finding healthy and useful ways to overcome those hurdles. After the foundational classes, each subsequent class meeting will focus on a different method of achieving balance that students will be able to incorporate during law school and bring with them into their professional careers. The final course meeting will be an opportunity for students to share their individual three-month wellness plan with the class.