Adventures in Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness

I was a freshman at Princeton University at the age of 14. My first mathematics class at Princeton was a section of honors calculus that mathematics majors usually take in the spring of their sophomore year. The course provided a theoretical introduction to multivariable analysis.

The course covered metric and topological spaces, continuous and differential mappings between n-dimensional real vector spaces, the inverse mapping theorem, the implicit function theorem, measure and content zero, Fubini’s theorem, partitions of unity, change of variable, exterior derivatives, differential forms, pullbacks, tangent spaces, tensor calculus, and the generalized modern Stokes’ theorem on manifolds-with-boundaries.

At the risk of sounding trite, happy people do not commit suicide; unhappy people do. Recently, researchers developed a mindfulness-to-meaning theory proposing that practicing mindfulness, through the promotion of positive reappraisal, fosters eudaimonic well-being, flourishing, a greater sense of purpose, and meaningful engagement with life.

Eric L. Garland et al., Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Eudaimonic Meaning: A Process Model of Mindful Positive Emotion Regulation, 26 Psychol. Inquiry 293 (2015).

I had not thought about suicide before learning of that suicide. I came to think about suicide at various times during the next three years, as do many teenagers. According to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention, teen suicide is the number two cause of death for youths ages 15 to 24, and is only surpassed by accidents.

American Psychological Association, Teen Suicide is Preventable, Research in Action, Psychological Science, http://www.apa.org/research/action/suicide.aspx

There are many causes of suicide “--biological, environmental, psychological and situational”

Adam Strassberg, Guest Opinion: Keep Calm and Carry On, Palo Alto Online, Mar. 16, 2015, 2:51 p.m., https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/03/16/guest-opinion-keep-calm-and-parent-on#sthash.UpnboeKF.dpuf

An analogous paragraph to the above paragraph applies to law students and lawyers in the sense that improving the happiness, mental health, and quality of life for law students and lawyers can and should be priorities for them, their clients, and our society-at-large. Happy and healthy law students learn how to be happy and healthy lawyers who can more effectively serve their clients. Learning to live with a growth mindset, more balance, better and more sleep, more resilience, and stress management are perspectives and skills that law professors can teach and law students can learn. Happy and healthy lawyers can realize their potential to accomplish much social good. Unhappy and unhealthy lawyers can realize their potential to cause much social harm.

Suicidologists (those who study suicide behavior and prevention

American Association of Suicidology Website, http://www.suicidology.org/

A large body of research links perfectionism to suicide ideation and attempts.

See, e.g., Sidney J. Blatt, The Destructiveness of Perfectionism: Implications for the Treatment of Depression, 50 Am. Psychol. 1003 (1995).

The study’s authors conclude their findings “lend credence to theoretical accounts suggesting self-generated and socially based pressures to be perfect are part of the premorbid personality of people prone to suicide ideation and attempts. Perfectionistic strivings’ association with suicide ideation also draws into question the notion that such strivings are healthy, adaptive, or advisable.”

Id.

A basic economic model of suicide assumes that a rational individual chooses to commit suicide when the net present discounted value of that person’s remaining expected lifetime happiness becomes negative or less than some benchmark level.

Daniel S. Hamermesh & Neal M. Soss, An Economic Theory of Suicide, 82 J. Pol. Econ. 83 (1974).

After my first year, I successfully applied to graduate in three years and became a junior in my second year. I also successfully applied to and became a university scholar as part of a program “designed for students with exceptional talent in an academic or creative area that cannot be pursued within the confines of the regular curriculum.”

Office of the Dean of the College, University Scholar Program, Princeton University, https://odoc.princeton.edu/curriculum/special-academic-programs/university-scholar-program

My junior independent work advisor was professor Charles Louis Fefferman, a child prodigy who was a freshman at the University of Maryland at the age of 14. Fefferman earned his B.S. with the highest distinction in mathematics and physics at the age of 17. Fefferman earned his mathematics Ph.D. from Princeton at the age of 20. Fefferman became a full professor at the University of Chicago at the age of 22. Fefferman was the youngest person ever appointed as a full professor in the United States. In 1973, Fefferman returned to Princeton University as a full professor at the age of 24. Fefferman was the first person to whom the National Science Foundation presented the Alan T. Waterman Award.

This is the highest honorary award in the United States given to scientists not older than thirty-five.

In my second year at Princeton, I sat in on Professor Fefferman teaching the course on advanced multivariable calculus that I took in the fall of my first year. Professor Fefferman’s conversational teaching style was congenial, easygoing, and fun.

For each of the main theorems about the geometry of differentiable mappings between n-dimensional real vector spaces, professor Fefferman presented alternate versions of the proofs, emphasizing the algebraic, differential, or topological aspects of the results. He also related each theorem to its lower-dimensional versions in the plane or space as well as their applications to and interpretations from classical and modern physics.

I have vivid memories of a wide-ranging one-and-one-half hour conversation, on a bus ride between Port Authority in New York City and Princeton’s Nassau Street, with Professor Fefferman about his research, teaching, and taking out the garbage before proving theorems in his then new role of husband to his wife Julie Anne Albert, who herself was a child prodigy in music who studied violin at the famed Juilliard School at the age of 9. He discussed the wide range of mathematical problems on which he worked.

Professor Fefferman is known for his path-breaking research in modern mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and geometry, partial differential equations, several complex variables, and Fourier analysis, which is the study of how complicated vibrations can be decomposed, represented, or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. He offered an example of what Fourier analysis is about by explaining how the complicated motion of a violin string consists of a fundamental note, a first overtone, a second overtone, and so forth.

He described how much he would enjoy lying on his couch and thinking deeply for hours at a time about change, relationships, shapes, and not so much about numbers per se. After he mentally investigated and cast of many of his ideas, he would eventually come upon a hopeful idea and be ready to pursue it further on paper. He emphasized how important optimism and perseverance are to working on difficult research problems. He said that solving an easier version of a complicated problem was his first step in making progress. He said that he would often go down many dead ends for quite some time before realizing that. He cautioned research can be highly nonlinear in its progress and often involves doubling back upon realizing having earlier made a mistake.

I was fascinated listening to Fefferman and learning about how he did his mathematics research! While his example was inspirational, I realized I had neither his rare mathematical talent nor the desire to become a pure mathematician because of a nascent interest about and attraction to mathematical economics. I earned in the spring of that year at Princeton a grade of A+ in the course Economic Dynamics,

This course covered difference equations, cobweb models, business cycle models, the Hansen-Samuelson multiplier-accelerator model, and Solow’s growth model.

My interests in applying mathematics to economics by becoming a mathematical economic theorist developed further upon taking a pair of graduate mathematical economics courses Linear and Convex Systems

This course covered convex analysis, fixed point theorems, separating hyperplane theorems, general equilibrium theory, the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, and algorithms for computing fixed points and general equilibria of competitive economies.

My senior thesis title was Applications of Catastrophe Theory to Economics. A French mathematician, René Thom, invented catastrophe theory,

René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of A General Theory of Models (1972).

I have remained ever since then interested in applications of catastrophe theory to study the stability of general economic equilibria,

See, e. g., Yves Balasko, Economic Equilibrium and Catastrophe Theory: An Introduction, 46 Econometrica 557 (1978).

My senior thesis advisor was Harold W. Kuhn, well-known for the Karash-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) theorem and the associated KKT conditions.

William Karash, Minima of Functions of Several Variables with Inequalities as Side Constraints, M. Sci. dissertation, Mathematics, Univ. of Chicago (1939); Harold W. Kuhn & Albert H. Tucker, Nonlinear Programming, Proc. 2nd Berkeley Symposium 481 (1951). The KKT theorem and KKT conditions are iconic in mathematical optimization as the first order necessary conditions for a solution of a nonlinear programming problem to be optimal (assuming that a regularity condition known as the constraint qualification is met). The KKT theorem and KKT conditions generalize the classic method of Lagrange multipliers, which apply only to the optimization of a function subject to equality constraints, to also permit inequality constraints.

I took professor Kuhn’s undergraduate Mathematical Programming course

This course covered linear programming, tableau algebra, duality theorems, Dantzig’s simplex method, matrix games, assignment problems, matching problems, transportation problems, network flow problems, the Hungarian method, quadratic programming, and nonlinear programming.

Although professors Fefferman and Kuhn had very different mathematical research interests, teaching styles and classroom presentation methods, both clearly had a passion for advancing the frontiers of research by creating knowledge and sharing their enthusiasm for learning by inspirationally communicating core concepts, organizing ideas, and multiple perspectives. I view both of them as exemplars and role models for professors who excel at research and teaching. Professors who are both excellent researchers and teachers are rare.

I enrolled at Harvard University in what is now known as the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to pursue a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the age of 17. My Ph.D. dissertation was titled Asymptotic and Structural Stability of Signalling Equilibria. My principal thesis advisor was Kenneth J. Arrow, a recipient of the 1972 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences at the age of 51, and who remains the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences.

Kenneth J. Arrow, General Economic Equilibrium: Purpose, Analytic Techniques, Collective Choice, 64 Am. Econ. Rev. 253 (1974) (Nobel lecture).

By assuming that higher education may or may not affect productivity, Spence was agnostic about education being a form of human capital. Spence focused instead on the sorting aspect of higher education signals. Two other recipients of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, Kenneth Arrow

Arrow, supra note 87.

Spence’s thesis analyzed the existence, economic inefficiency, and some other properties of job market signaling equilibria, which are defined as employers’ probability beliefs over productivity conditional on higher education that do not generate any disconfirming market data. There is now a vast economics literature about market signaling.

Spence, supra note 89.

I remember asking Arrow why Spence did not study the asymptotic stability and structural stability of market signaling equilibria. Arrow replied that both were difficult and challenging problems in mathematical economics. I took Arrow’s answer to be a call to action. Before that moment, I, as is true of many students who finished the course requirements of their Ph.D. program, was finding it challenging to decide on an interesting, manageable, and suitable dissertation topic. In my first year of graduate school, I took the comprehensive microeconomic theory course,

This course rigorously covered modern economic theories of consumption, production, behavior under risk, and general equilibrium theory.

I took in the spring of my first year of graduate school Arrow’s course Information, Communication, and Organization.

This course covered the general resource allocation problem, market allocation, uncertainty, demand for and value of information, transactions costs, bosses, authority, communication, team theory, budget planning, moral hazard, principal agent theory, hierarchical supervision, formal organization of decision making, expedience, and incentives.

I also took in the spring semester of my first year of graduate school another fascinating course, A Mathematical Approach to General Equilibrium.

This course covered the mathematics of combinatorial topology, differentiable topology, and algebraic topology. It also covered economic applications to general equilibrium theory and social choice theory, in addition to applications to biology, chemistry, and physics.

It was and still is rare to have a woman professor teach a graduate course in mathematical economics. I have been struck by how few women there are at conferences for economics professors and how many more women there are at conferences for psychology and/or marketing professors, even though all three disciplines require quantitative and statistical coursework and proficiency. Gender discrimination and inequality in economics and academia are unfortunate for women and society. University of Michigan professor of complex systems, political science, and economics Scott Page wrote a book rigorously analyzing and providing evidence for how important diversity of viewpoints is to solving individual and collective problems.

Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (new ed. 2008).

Chichilnisky wrote a candid, fascinating chapter about two lessons that she learned from having to deal with a glass ceiling and gender inequity at Columbia University:

See, e. g., Valerie Strauss, Taking on the Economics of Gender Inequity, Wash. Post, Dec. 3, 2007.

In his path-breaking Ph.D. thesis, Arrow proved there is no voting procedure that satisfies all of these desirable axioms: consensus, decisiveness, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship.

Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (2012 reprint of 1951 ed.).

Law professor Leo Katz argues that many legal foundational conundrums, puzzles, and perversities arise from a constellation of related logical difficulties associated with legal doctrines involving multi-criterial decision-making.

Leo Katz, Why the Law is So Perverse (2011). See also Leo Katz & Alvaro Sandroni, The Inevitability and Ubiquity of Cycling in All Feasible Legal Regimes: A Formal Proof, 46 J. Legal Stud. 237 (2017).

In the summer between my second and third years of graduate school, I followed Arrow to Stanford, where he went annually to participate in a series of seminars and workshops at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (I.M.S.S.S.) and later its successor, the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (S.I.T.E.). Talks occurred weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Presenters distributed their unpublished working papers beforehand. There were lively debates, discussions, and exchanges before, during, and after each talk. All the papers concerned some novel aspect of mathematical economics. Sometimes there were additional talks about game theory on Wednesdays. Presenters ranged from past and future Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences recipients, including the famed game theorist Aumann; Roger Myerson, another of Arrow’s former applied mathematics graduate students and a 2007 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences recipient;

Roger Myerson, Perspectives on Mechanism Design in Economic Theory, 98 Am. Econ. Rev. 586 (2008).

I vividly remember many thought-provoking and stimulating lunches, while sitting outside Stanford’s coffee house or Tressider Memorial Union. One was with Arrow and D. John Roberts, a Stanford graduate school of business (GSB) management professor. We discussed professors who published just one very well-received article and subsequently only published less well-received articles or never published anything else. These folks are the scholarly equivalent of music performers who are known as one-hit wonders. We mused over whether they were better of than others who never published any very well-received articles.

We also spoke about how Redwood City, California, approximately five miles northwest of Stanford University, has a motto: “Climate Best by Government Test,” which refers to it being a location the United States and German governments determined through climate surveys and meteorological data to have one of the world’s three best climates, with the other two being the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean Coast of North Africa.

Quora, What does the “climate best by government test” sign at the Redwood City Caltrain station mean?https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-climate-best-by-government-test-sign-at-the-Redwood-City-Caltrain-station-mean

In a fun lunch with Aumann, we spoke at length about many topics, including his article about whether two people can agree to disagree,

Robert J. Aumann, Agreeing to Disagree, 4 Ann. Stat. 1236 (1976).

In addition to lunches, there were many engaging and fun conversations about academia and mathematical economics in corridors, elevators, offices, and outdoors. I remember having numerous conversations with Paul Milgrom,

Paul Milgrom Personal Website, http://www.milgrom.net/

During my third year of graduate school, Arrow decided to leave Harvard and return to Stanford. I followed Arrow to Stanford with the official designations of traveling scholar at Harvard and visiting scholar at Stanford. I underwent a delayed adolescence at Stanford, while being a teaching assistant for a section of intermediate microeconomics. I learned to ride a bicycle, drive a car, play organized 6-person volleyball (unfortunately on asphalt courts instead of sand or even grass), date Stanford co-eds, and understand the pros and cons of running different plays and sets in a 6-2 versus 5-1 offensive system in intercollegiate women’s volleyball.

I attended every home and away match the Stanford women’s volleyball team played one season. A setter/outside hitter on that team, Jody Freeman, would often do one-handed push-ups on the sidelines during warm-ups before matches to intimidate and psych out opposing teams. Jody today is the Archibald Cox professor at Harvard law school, the founding director of its environmental law and policy program, a leading environmental law and administrative law and regulation scholar, and independent outside director at ConocoPhillips, serving on its public policy and compensation committees.

Harvard Law School Faculty Profiles, Jody Freeman, http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10285/Freeman; Harvard Law School Faculty, Professor Jody Freeman, http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/freeman/

I sat in on and was a grader for the year-long graduate industrial organization course Bill Rogerson,

William Rogerson Northwestern University Economics Department Home Page, http://facultywcas.northwestern.edu/~wpr603/

I also sat in on several graduate courses at Stanford GSB about game theory, multi-person decision theory, information economics, public finance and taxation, and topics in game theory. A new assistant professor of decision sciences, Anat Admati,

Anat R. Admati, Stanford Graduate School of Business, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r-admati

I was an economics instructor at Cañada Community College, assistant professor at Tulane University, and visiting assistant professor at the University of Iowa, Southern Methodist University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University. I have taught a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate economics courses: microeconomics principles, macroeconomics principles, intermediate microeconomics, industrial organization, public finance, mathematical economics, microeconomic theory, advanced microeconomic theory; law and economics, modern welfare economics, economics of the firm, organization economics, speculative markets, game theory and economic applications, and optimization and economic analysis. I have also taught these two courses in the finance department of the A.B. Freeman business school at Tulane University: investments, a standard required undergraduate business course,

This course covered modern portfolio theory, capital asset pricing model, arbitrage pricing theory, bonds, stocks, mutual funds, and collectibles.

At the start of my second semester at Tulane, on the first day of class, I was going over my section of the principles of microeconomics course syllabus in class when a student raised her hand and asked if I knew what Mardi Gras was. I replied I was familiar with the concept. She said Mardi Gras is not a concept, it’s a way of life. I said everything is a concept and asked if she would care to elaborate about Mardi Gras because she seemed to be very familiar with the Mardi Gras concept. She said that Mardi Gras is an opportunity to go out, drink alcohol, party, and have a fun time. I thought and did not say how does that differ from many other evenings in her undergraduate experience. I decided to ask why she asked if I was familiar with Mardi Gras. She answered because on the course syllabus, there is a reading assignment for Mardi Gras and a related homework assignment due on the next day. She asked if this was my initial year of teaching at Tulane. I stated yes and she as a freshman said that I would come to learn to have more realistic expectations about what students do on Mardi Gras and how many students attend classes the day after Mardi Gras. She was quite right. I learned that year to never again assign any reading for Mardi Gras nor have homework due on the day after Mardi Gras. Both would be quite unrealistic for most students.

During the course review session for a section of microeconomics principles I taught at Tulane, a student asked if a particular topic we were discussing was important. I thought and did not say sarcastically the topic was unimportant and I was just wasting their time and mine. I instead asked that student what she meant by important, for her soul, the final examination, or life? She replied of course for the purposes of passing the final examination and the course. I replied there are more important things than any one final examination grade and any one course grade. She said while that was true in the grand scheme of things, her immediate focus had to be on the final examination grade. I tried to convince her that learning to appreciate the benefits and costs of seeing the world from a microeconomics point of view likely would have a longer-term impact on her life than her final examination grade. I am not sure if she was convinced. As Sean Covey wrote in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, “grades are important, learning is more important, so make sure you don’t forget why you’re in school to begin with.”

Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens 220 (2014).

After teaching three years at Tulane, I passed a mid-tenure review and received an academic year-long sabbatical, during the fall of which I was a visiting scholar at Stanford law school and a visiting assistant professor in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. I taught a section of intermediate microeconomics with about ninety students. One of the students asked me whether I thought it was a good idea to apply to law school. I asked her if she wanted to attend law school. She answered that her dad wanted her to attend law school. I asked her again if she wanted to attend law school. She answered that her boyfriend wanted her to attend law school. I asked her once more if she wanted to attend law school. She answered that she was not sure that she wanted to attend law school. I told her that she did very well on the midterm and could apply to attend business school, public policy school, or graduate school in economics. She ended up applying to law school and choosing between attending law at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt law school.

Terrance Odean was another student in that course. Terry always sat in the front row of class. It was only last May during the 2016 Boulder summer conference on consumer financial decision-making

http://www.colorado.edu/business/sites/default/files/attached-files/boulder_summer_conference_program_2016_corrected_proof.pdf

Terry is now a well-known behavioral financial economist at the Rudd Family Foundation Professor and Chair of the Finance Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

Terrance Odean Personal Homepage, http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/

Terry also created a series of user-friendly instructional personal finance videos on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PR67895/playlists

I earned a J.D. from Stanford law school (SLS) upon transferring after being a 1L at the University of Chicago (U of C) law school. I have already written at some length elsewhere about being an anxious, stressed fish-out-of-water 1L at the U of C,

Huang, supra note 1, at 328-31.

Some colleagues have asked me whether and how being a 2L and 3L at SLS differed from being a 1L at U of C law school. The answer is the difference is like that between temperate, cheerful, blue-sky, and sunny Palo Alto, California versus cold, gloomy, gray, and overcast Hyde Park, Illinois. The student cultures at SLS and U of C are genuinely like day and night respectively. At the U of C law school, most students humble-bragged they studied weekends, even if they did not. At SLS, most students humble-bragged they did not study weekends, even if they did. At the U of C law school, most professors called students Mr. or Ms. and the student’s last name. At SLS, most professors called students by the student’s first name. At the U of C law school, most professors used the cold-calling inquisitorial Socratic method, some effectively and some not. At SLS, professors used various teaching methods, including a gentler and kinder form of Socratic dialogue without cold calling and with students on assigned panels, voluntary discussion, and/or lecture. At the U of C law school, most professors dressed in suits as their teaching costumes, even women. At SLS, most professors dressed in what the SLS registrar called the faculty’s casual gardening clothes (because they were fertilizing their students’ minds). At the U of C law school, many students and faculty would habitually and routinely apply elementary microeconomics to analyze law, even if they did it often simplistically and sometimes incorrectly. At SLS, many students and faculty criticized applying elementary microeconomics to analyze legal rules and institutions, even if they did it often simplistically and sometimes incorrectly.

I took many seminars at SLS and for each one, wrote an independent research paper, some of which formed the foundation of a law review article published after law school. For example, I learned basic human biology and genetics in a seminar course titled Advanced Health Law, covering the ethical, legal, and social implications arising from advances in our knowledge of human genetics.

This course covered such topics as consequences of genetics for human reproduction, ethics of genomic biobanks for research, forensic uses of genetics, genetic enhancement, genetic testing, genome editing, genome synthesis, and widespread whole genome sequencing.

I took a course titled Decision Analysis

This one-credit pass fail course was cross-listed in several other departments and required students to attend weekly presentations about decision-making by professors from other law schools, economics departments, and psychology departments.

After the first law school class I taught, a University of Pennsylvania law student came up and asked if this was the first time I was teaching securities regulation. I answered yes and he replied that he preferred to take a course from a professor who was not teaching it for the first time. I said that I understood and respected how he felt. I thought and did not say that I preferred to teach students who were not taking a course for the first time. My point in recounting this interaction is to draw attention to how students in any course are heterogeneous in their background, motivation, preparation, and tenacity. Students have the options to be more or less hard-working, motivated, and prepared. Teachers must accept a reality in which not all students will be hard-working, motivated, and prepared to learn. Teachers can and should engage students by making clear why the course is relevant for students and how the course can make a positive difference in their lives.

Karl Schellscheidt was a student in my section of securities regulation in his and my second year at the University of Pennsylvania law school. We shared a meal and/or ice cream together every now and then in the food court near the law school in the semesters after Karl took the course. His eldest daughter was born right before he started law school, his second was born right after his second year first semester exams, and his third was born right after he took the bar exam. Karl was a corporate lawyer for Dechert LLP for a couple of years.

Five years after Karl graduated, I saw Karl again in McCafrey’s Food Market in Princeton shopping center when I was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study School of Social Science during the 2005-2006 academic year, its psychology and economics themed year. We resumed our friendship and spoke about utilizing technology to democratize the delivery of education. Based on his over twenty-five years of teaching and private tutoring experience, Karl co-founded ePrep, Inc., a unique video-based online test prep study program that provides the benefits of expert private tutoring to its clients at an affordable cost.

ePrep, https://www.eprep.com/

I taught in the spring of my first year of teaching law school a first-year perspectives elective in law and economics. I had taught versions of an undergraduate course in law and economics in the economics departments at Tulane University and the University of Southern California. Many of those students were pre-law majors in economics or political economy and all of the students had taken intermediate microeconomics. We covered a brief introductory paperback about law and economics

A. Mitchell Polinsky, An Introduction to Law and Economics (4th ed. 2011).

Two law students in that course received a grade of A+ and made the University of Pennsylvania law review because of that. Both of those students took securities regulation from me in the fall of their and my second year at the University of Pennsylvania law school. One of them became a summer associate practicing securities in the New York City office of a so-called “white shoe” law firm. She jokingly asked me if I would be able to get her out of the University of Pennsylvania law school public interest requirement. I replied that I did not have the power and even if I did, she should do some public interest. She chose to teach law to local high school students and found it exhilarating. I asked if that experience changed her career plans. She replied that she had accepted an offer to be an associate in the New York City office of a so-called “white shoe” law firm to be focusing on securities, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity. She mentioned that she was tired of eating Kraft brand or even sometimes generic brands of macaroni and cheese. A couple of years later, when I attended the American law and economics association meetings held at NYU law school, we met for dinner. She ordered as her main course an entree of macaroni and cheese that cost forty-five dollars. She mentioned that if she is at work after six-o-clock, she can order dinner compliments of her law firm and if she is at work past nine-o-clock, she can order a limousine ride home compliments of her law firm. If she was a rational economic actor who learned law and economics well, then she would probably leave work after 9 p.m.

I have taught a diverse range of elective and required courses in law schools at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. I have taught these courses: business associations; business basics for lawyers; corporate finance; derivative securities and their regulation; economic analysis of law; financial decision-making; law and economics; law and human behavior; law, happiness, and neuroscience; law, happiness, and subjective well-being; law and popular culture; legal ethics and professionalism: business law issues; media, law and popular culture; neuroscience and law; securities regulation; securities litigation and enforcement; and torts. I was the inaugural Harold E. Kohn Chair professor at Temple University law school. I am currently a law professor and the inaugural DeMuth Chair of business law at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When I was a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, some other members were surprised by my being a lawyer and former mathematical economist. An economic theorist stated that my introducing myself to him as a business law professor was misleading as it belied how much general equilibrium theory I knew and that I co-authored an article in the Journal of Mathematical Economics about existence of general equilibrium for a system of incomplete asset markets.

Peter H. Huang & Ho-Mou Wu, Competitive Equilibrium of Incomplete Markets for Securities with Smooth Payoffs, 23 J. Mathematical Econ. 219 (1994).

Two women behavioral law and economics scholars who each hold a J.D. and an economics Ph.D. asked me while I was a 1L whether I found being a law student or undergraduate mathematics major or graduate student in applied mathematics taking graduate economics courses to be more challenging or difficult. I told both of them such a comparison is like that between apples and oranges. That being said, I also told them that law school was often pedantic and unintellectual, while economics and mathematics were fun. Additionally, there is an about one order of magnitude difference between the couple of hundred first-year students in an entering class of a top law school program compared to about thirty first-year students in an entering class of a top economics graduate program. That difference reflects both applicant preferences and program selectivity. That difference also is associated with differences in student competition and culture. Graduate economics courses have Ph.D. teaching assistants running weekly sections and grading written homework assignments and midterms. Law school courses provide no such teaching support nor regular feedback to students.

I offered the above personal higher educational history to provide some background and context about my unique perspectives towards, and interests in, improving legal education. I learned many lessons from my unique experiences in higher education. For example, while a 1L, I paid close attention to how my law professors taught in addition to what they taught. There was very high variance across law professors in pedagogical efficiency and proficiency of Socratic dialogue. When I was an entry-level law faculty candidate, a senior non-business law professor asked me during an office interview if I would teach securities regulation using the tried and true method of Socratic instruction. I answered I would teach securities regulation the same way that it was taught to me by former S.E.C. Commissioner Joe Grundfest, namely using a lecture format. The senior non-business law professor leading the interview disagreed vehemently with not using the Socratic method and said Socratic dialogue is the only way to teach law students how to think for themselves. I chose not to ask this professor if he had any empirical data or evidence to support his assertion. I did not get an offer to join the faculty of that professor’s law school.

I have learned as a teacher to meet students as they are and where they are. Teachers may prefer their students to be different people or to know less or more than they do. I also learned that it helps most students to not “hide the ball” in teaching. Most students appreciate having the course learning objectives and the method(s) of learning assessment explicitly stated (and emphasized) on their course syllabus. The method(s) of learning assessment should measure the student achievement of the course learning objectives. If there is a mismatch, then one or both must change to result in a match. The course assessment method(s) will dictate what students choose to spend their attention and time learning. The final examination or whatever is the course assessment method usually is the proverbial tail that wags the dog. Teachers are role models and sources of emotional contagion. If a teacher is curious, kind, and passionate, students are more likely to also be curious, kind, and passionate. Finally, I learned that a law school’s leadership can matter a great deal, both positively and negatively. A law school dean can demoralize, dishearten, and undermine a law school’s faculty, students, and staff by running a law school with a lack of ethics, lack of leadership, lack of accountability, secrecy, and top-down micro-management. A law school dean can instead encourage, hearten, and inspire a law school’s faculty, students, and staff by running a law school with accountability, confident leadership, ethical leadership, participatory decision-making, and transparency. Leadership can make a big difference in the daily lived experiences of a law school’s faculty, students, and staff. I co-authored an article applying psychological game theory to demonstrate the importance of organizational leaders being ethical leaders and role models to avoid corrupt cultures from developing and taking over an organization.

Peter H. Huang & Ho-Mou Wu, More Order Without More Law: A Theory of Social Norms and Organizational Cultures, 10 J.L. Econ. & Org. 390 (1994).

A 2014 cross-sectional survey of law students at fifteen law schools found that about “one-quarter to one-third of respondents reported frequent binge drinking or misuse of drugs, and/or reported mental health challenges. Moreover, the results indicated that significant majorities of those law students most in need of help are reluctant to seek it.”

Organ, Jafee, & Bender, supra note 23, at 116.

Although many other professionals also face stress, as Yvette Hourigan, director of the Kentucky Lawyer Assistance Program, cogently pointed out:

Lawyers are often financially rewarded for being hostile. Some clients will seek and hire the most aggressive, antagonistic, argumentative, intimidating, unpleasant, and unsympathetic jerk of a gladiator they can find to be their divorce or torts lawyer. Adversarial rules of civil and criminal procedure incentivize, normalize, and reward a zero-sum, hypercompetitive, no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, winner-take-all mentality and mindset. An economically-minded observer might simply characterize the unhealthiness of law practice and law school as just additional costs of being a lawyer and law student, albeit emotional health, mental health and physical health costs that are hard to perhaps measure, observe, quantify, and verify.

Legal education often implicitly and even sometimes explicitly trains and socializes law students to be amoral, if not immoral.

Peter H. Huang, How Improving Decision-Making and Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics and Professionalism, 21 J.L. Bus. & Ethics 35 (2015).

Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist wrote an opinion about private securities fraud litigation in which he stated: “we deal with a judicial oak which has grown from little more than a legislative acorn.”

Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723, 737 (1974).

Empirical evidence finds that law schools do not select unhappy students.

Lawrence S. Krieger & Kennon M. Sheldon, What Makes Lawyers Happy?: A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, 83 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 554 (2015).

Perhaps due to path dependence and serendipity, more legal clinical faculty, legal writing faculty, and law school administrators than legal doctrinal faculty have teaching and research interests about law student and lawyer happiness. This is unfortunate because legal doctrinal faculty have the most power and status at law schools in comparison with legal clinical faculty, legal writing faculty, and non-decanal law school administrators. This neglect of law student and lawyer well-being is yet another of the many inequities, issues, and problems with the traditional, institutional, and illegitimate status hierarchy among American law school faculties.

Kathryn M. Stanchi, Who Next the Janitors? A Socio-Feminist Critique of the Status Hierarchy of Law Professors, 73 UMKC L. Rev. 469 (2004).

Psychology professor Kennon Sheldon and law professor Lawrence Krieger conducted longitudinal studies at two law schools and found that law students at both schools experienced significant and substantial erosion of well-being and psychological need satisfaction within the first year of law school. They summarize the state of research findings as of 2007 in the first paragraph of their article:

There have since then been precipitously sharp declines in the demand for legal services

See, e.g., James E. Daily, Embracing New (and Old) Ideas, 53 Wash. U.J. L. & Pol’y 157, 161-63 (2017).

James Daily, attorney, Washington law school lecturer, and creator and author of a blog about superheroes, supervillains, and the law,

Law and the Multiverse, http://lawandthemultiverse.com/

The AccessLex Institute, a nonprofit organization “underpinned by nearly 200 American Bar Association-approved nonprofit and state-affiliated law schools,”

About AccessLex Institute, https://www.accesslex.org/about-us

People apply to and attend law school for many reasons. Because law school is a graduate professional school, most college graduates who apply to law school want to practice law, at least for a while. While there are many things that a person can do as a law school alum, most become lawyers. People desire to become attorneys for many personal and professional reasons, including doing good, fighting for justice, getting rich, having social status, helping people, and making a difference. The rest of this section considers motivations people have in attending law schools.

It has become commonplace to say that students are consumers who buy the commodity of education. A problem with this metaphor is that students are by definition less than fully informed consumers about what it is they are consuming. If they were fully informed, they already would know the information they seek through education. Education is more than information transmission, which takes attention, effort and time, by students and teachers alike. Education entails a set of in-class and related out-of-class experiences, which may have positive or negative affect. Such experiences, though ephemeral, can have lasting impacts in terms of biological consequences and memories. Whether people and society should care more about people’s experiences or their memories are intriguing questions.

Peter H. Huang, Torn Between Two Selves: Should Law Care More About Experiencing Selves or Remembering Selves? 17 S.M.U. Sci. & Tech. L. Rev. 263 (2014).

It has also become commonplace to say that law students are investors in human capital by acquiring the skills of legal analysis. More generally, pursuing any professional degree is a form of investment under uncertainty. Many variables are unknown and likely unknowable, such as future market returns of a professional degree. The past is never a guarantee of the future. The market for attorney services is under intense flux and pressure due to increasing automation, domestic and foreign competition from non-lawyers, and technological changes in the delivery of legal services.

See, e.g., Benjamin H. Barton & Stephanos Bibas, Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law (2017); Mark A. Cohen, When Good is Good Enough: Finding The Appropriate Legal Delivery Resources, Forbes, Aug. 3, 2017, 5:54 a.m., https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcohen1/2017/08/03/when-good-is-good-enough-finding-the-appropriate-legal-delivery-resources/2/#160f26f96827;Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Legal Automation Spells Relief for Lower-income Americans, Hard Times for Lawyers, USA Today, updated 3:55 p.m. ET, Aug. 7, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/07/legal-automation-spells-relief-lower-income-americans-hard-times-lawyers/543542001/

For example, Do Not Pay is a completely free lawyer chatbot that democratizes legal assistance, including disputing parking tickets, assisting with landlord disputes, getting compensation from airlines for losing luggage or cancelling flights, disputing credit card charges, disputing credit report items, filing and disputing insurance claims, filing for or extending maternity and paternity leaves, filing complaints with the United States EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), and getting consumer product refunds or replacements.

Joshua Browder, The World’s First Robot Lawyer – Now in 1,000 Legal Areas, You Tube, July 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rabJDCBUbY; John Mannes, DoNotPay Launches 1,000 New Bots to Help You with Your Legal Problems, TechCrunch, July 12, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/donotpay-launches-1000-new-bots-to-help-you-with-your-legal-problems/

The financial costs of attending law school include tuition, living expenses, and opportunity costs. There are also likely emotional costs, such as chronic stress, feeling overwhelmed, and negative impacts on personal relationships. There are even possible mental, physical, and psychological health costs, such as being constantly tired, insomnia, lack of physical exercise, loss of autonomy, substance abuse, and unhealthy eating habits. The benefits of investing in a law school education include financial opportunities that come from being able to practice law, psychological advantages of higher self-esteem and improved social status, and cognitive value of having been exposed to legal analysis. Just what legal analysis is or includes is up to debate. Many law students would say that legal analysis entails analogical reasoning, statutory interpretation, and persuasive legal writing.

Recently, there have been interesting analyses of the value of a J.D. in relation to law student debt and over the course of the business cycle. Law professor and former University of Louisville law school dean Jim Chen utilized mortgage lending guidelines that the Federal Home Administration and private lenders developed to calculate how much of an annual salary a law school graduate has to earn in relation to annual law school tuition to achieve marginal, adequate, and good ratios of income to debt.

Jim Chen, A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability, 38 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1185 (2012). See also Jim Chen, ARM-Twisting “A Degree of Practical Wisdom”: A One-Year Readjustment of Legal Education’s Debt-Based Stress Test, MoneyLaw Blog, Oct. 20, 2102, http://money-law.blogspot.com/2012/10/arm-twisting-degree-of-practical-wisdom.html (revising his analysis).

The market for legal services, like most job markets, involves asymmetric or private information in the sense that people know more about themselves than do potential employers. This informational gap is ameliorated somewhat by employers screening potential employees using such market signals as the U.S. News & World Report ranking of the law school attended, class ranking, law school G.P.A., and law review membership. So-called white shoe law firms are still hiring and offering high salaries to graduates of top law schools. Students used to joke at SLS that the hardest part about SLS was getting admitted to SLS. Some SLS students did not attend classes, preferring to use commercial study aids and classmates’ notes to prepare for their finals.

Although market signals are imperfect proxies for some of the unobservable variables that legal employers care about, they are somewhat informative and free to potential employers. At Yale law school (YLS), where there are only two possible course grades: honors and high honors, some law students work very hard to differentiate themselves from their accomplished colleagues. Because the grades at YLS are noisy and uninformative signals, the many students planning to eventually go into legal academia or seek those prestigious federal judicial clerkships that are known as feeder clerkships for Supreme Court clerkships look for other ways to signal their legal ability, discipline, or work ethic, such as authoring a student note or being a faculty research assistant.

Law school certainly transmits legal information in the form of so-called “black letter” law to law students. More generally and importantly, law schools also transmit what is often called “thinking like a lawyer” or so-called critical thinking skills.

See, e.g., Thomas D. Morgan, The Vanishing American Lawyer 179-81 (2010).

Law students undergo a transformation during law school, in many ways for which students are not always prepared.

Nelson P. Miller, Going to Law School: Preparing for a Transformative Experience (2016).

Law schools teach law students to think like a lawyer, whatever that means exactly. It is helpful to students for professors to be transparent and explicitly state that law school teaches a certain style or way of thinking.

Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, & Karin Morrison, Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (2011).

Naturally, law schools teach law students how to read and extract legally relevant information from judicial opinions, regulations, and statutes. Law schools do more than just merely transmit information though. Law schools also teach law students “how to think like lawyers,” a cognitive set of skills that include specific habits of thought. Those habits of thought that may be helpful professionally may not be helpful personally. Cross-examining significant others or one’s children is likely to be a bad idea.

Law school alumni vary greatly in their engagement and involvement with their law school. Law school alumni can feel adoration, apathy, connection, contempt, hatred, and indifference towards their law school. Some law school alumni derive a positive sense of identity from being a graduate of their law school. Most people have fond memories of their college days when they became adults. Many people made life-long friends in college. Some people met their spouse or significant other in college. It was and still is commonplace for many students to go to law school directly after graduating from college. Thus, there are law school alumni who also have fond memories of their law school days, made life-long friends in law school, and met their spouse or significant other in law school.

The anxiety, chronic stress depression, and overall unhappiness that many law students have self-reported also means that many law school alumni have quite negative affective memories of their law school days. It also means that some law school alumni want no reminders of their law school days. Traditional five-year reunions offer alumni opportunities to reconnect with their friends (and possibly faculty), reminisce on their law school days, and revisit anew their law school. Those who attend their law school reunions form a proper, self-selected, and possibly unrepresentative subset of their law school alumni.

Overall, law school alumni are motivated to feel good about being a graduate of their law school. This motivation explains why many law school alumni are happy when the ranking of their law school alma matter goes up in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking and are unhappy if not upset when the ranking of their law school alma matter falls in the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking. Happy law school alumni are likely to make supporting their law school alma mater a philanthropic priority, while unhappy law school alumni are not. Fundraising entails building connections and sustaining relationships with potential donors. Potential alumni donors differ in their motives, needs, and expectations. There are seven types of major donors, namely altruist, communitarian, devout, dynast, investor, repayer, and socialite.

Russ Alan Prince & Karen Maru File, The Seven Faces of Philanthropy: A New Approach to Cultivating Major Donors (2001).

Clients hire lawyers to help solve legal problems. In litigation, clients hire lawyers to initiate or defend lawsuits. Clients hire lawyers for their legal expertise, practice experience, and problem-solving skills. Litigators also negotiate settlements of lawsuits. In transactional practice, clients hire lawyers to take companies public, defend against hostile takeovers, defend against Department of Justice prosecutions or Securities Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) enforcement actions, perform S.E.C. compliance, draft agreements for corporations, limited liability companies, or limited partnerships, make tender offers, or negotiate mergers or acquisitions. In alternative dispute resolution and mediation, clients hire lawyers to be advocates or neutrals.

Clients often hire lawyers at very emotional and stressful times for the clients. Most clients are not familiar with legalese, legal procedure, and the legal system. Human, as opposed to organizational, clients often despise and fear lawyers, including their own. The American legal system is not user-friendly, except for the knowledgeable and rich. As past Harvard University President and former Harvard law school dean Derek Bok wrote: “There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.”

Derek Bok, A Flawed System, Harvard Magazine, May-June 1983, at 38.

Many lawyers’ clients and law firms view lawyers today more as fungible commodities than people. Law once was a noble profession. Law now is a highly competitive business. Medicine and higher education also were once noble professions and now highly competitive businesses. Commodification of law, medicine, and higher education means that employers and customers in law, medicine, and higher education view lawyers, physicians, and professors as being highly interchangeable and replaceable. Such commodification is the result of such inexorable forces as automation, technological progress, and online competition. This commodification is related to a business, economic, and financial perspective to social transactions and market interactions. Conversations about law, medicine, and higher education now routinely utilize the language of benefits, competition, costs, efficiencies, externalities, markets, and tradeoffs. It is contested how individually and socially harmful are economics rhetoric, commodification discourse, and market metaphors.

Margaret J. Radin, Contested Commodities (2001); Kenneth J. Arrow, Invaluable Goods 35 Am. Econ. Rev. 757 (1997) (reviewing Radin’s book); Peter H. Huang, Dangers of Monetary Commensurability: A Psychological Game Model of Contagion, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1701 (1998); Peter H. Huang, Emotional Reactions to Law and Economics, Market Metaphors, and Rationality Rhetoric, in Theoretical Foundations of Law and Economics 163 (Mark D. White ed., 2009).

In the last thirty-five years, approximately thirty client-based and attorney-based empirical studies

Randal Kiser, Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer 25-26, n.5, 26-33, 292-302 (2017).

An open empirical question is whether legal education must have deleterious effects on law student happiness and well-being. What is empirically resolved is that current legal education does have deleterious effects on the self-reported happiness and subjective well-being of many law students.

Krieger & Sheldon, supra note 193.

Alcohol (over)consumption is accepted in the student culture of many law schools. Many law school events and functions routinely serve alcohol. Many law students get together to drink alcohol during a weekly informal “bar review” night, often Thursday before additional drinking at weekends parties and/or tailgating before football games. The lawyer well-being report issued recently by the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being explicitly and expressly recommends that law schools deemphasize alcohol at social events and discourage alcohol-centered social events.

National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, supra note 19, at 4, 5, 11, 19, 33, 40, n. 159.

The danger of drug abuse is vividly illustrated by the story of Peter, who was a chemist before becoming a high-powered, successful patent lawyer.

Eilene Zimmernan, The Lawyer, the Addict, N.Y. Times, July 16, 2017, at BU1.

Eileen told Peter’s heart-breaking story, including a sad, haunting fact that the last call Peter made on his cell phone was a conference call into work.

See also Debra Cassens Weiss, BigLaw Partner Managed to Dial in to Work Conference Call Before His Drug-Related Death, A.B.A. J., Work-Life Balance, July 19, 2017, 7:00 a.m. C.D.T., http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/drug_addicted_biglaw_partner_managed_to_dial_in_to_work_conference_call_bef/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email

The fictional AMC television series Better Call Saul viscerally showed the possible tragic consequences that can result from lawyers who are suffering chronic stress and mental illness.

Adam Banner, ‘Better Call Saul’ Highlights Stress and Mental Illness in the Legal Profession, ABA J., July 31, 2017, 8:30 am CDT, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/better_call_saul_highlights_stress_and_mental_illness_in_the_legal_professi

Eilene remembers Peter working over sixty hours every week for twenty years ever since he started law school. Peter was a law review editor who graduated number one is his law school class and spoke at his commencement.

Zimmernan, supra note 248.

Law professors engage in teaching, scholarship, and service. Motivations of law professors for teaching, scholarship, and service are as varied as law professors. Some law professors only enjoy and/or are capable of doing well one of teaching, scholarship, and service. Other law professors enjoy and/or are capable of doing well all three of teaching, scholarship, and service.

In introductory economics courses, students learn the principle of comparative advantage in discussing the gains from international trade. British economist David Ricardo published in chapter seven of his political economy treatise,

David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation 77-93 (1817, 2004 ed.).

Considerations of equity, fairness, or tradition prevent having professors specializing in only doing one of teaching, scholarship, and service. There are de facto exceptions in the form of reduced teaching loads for professors who excel at research or service. In the natural and social sciences, it is common for professors to apply for and be granted external research funds that explicitly include buying time of from some or all of a professor’s teaching to do research. Some professors are able to effectively teach little if at all as long as they are able to secure highly competitive research grants and their renewals. This is especially true at higher-ranked research universities. There are no Nobel laureates in teaching excellence. In medical schools, professors often pay for laboratory space and part of their salaries from external research funding sources. Most grants also pay for overhead and often summer salaries. In law schools, professors do not have a tradition of having to apply for and secure external research funds.

Teaching and service can be fulfilling, though often labor-intensive and time-consuming. Both teaching and service also usually entail developing what economists would call firm-specific human capital. In other words, teaching and service are less observable and transferable than research. Publications are public information and proof of the ability to do research. Most professors have a research agenda or plan in the sense of multiple publications. Some professors believe in the concept of publishing only the least publishable unit of work product. Other professors publish the same idea multiple times in slightly different publications. Law reviews exacerbate these problems because law reviews are not peer-refereed, permit multiple, simultaneous submissions, and expedite manuscript reviews based on the signal of acceptance by lower-ranked law reviews. A recent law review article cleverly parodies and satirizes law review articles in general.

Pierre Schlag, The Law Review Article, 88 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1043 (2017).

My law school’s current dean presented this top five list of reasons that law professors do research and write articles.

S. James Anaya, Presentation at the University of Colorado Law School faculty scholarship retreat, Making a Difference: Impactful Legal Scholarship, May 20, 2017, Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, CO.

Law professors can and should teach law students to become life-long learners who embrace curiosity,

Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life (2015).

Law professors Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder co-authored a wonderful book about happiness for law students and lawyers,

Nancy Levit & Douglas O. Linder, The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law (2010).

A recent meta-analysis of twenty-nine studies, involving a total of 3319 participants, found training interventions can increase optimism and various factors increasing significantly effect size, such as utilizing a visualizing the best possible self exercise and providing the intervention in-person.

John M. Malouf & Nicola S. Schutte, Can Psychological Interventions Increase Optimism? A Meta-Analysis, 12 J. Positive Psychology 594 (2017).

There are many books about happiness that law professors can learn from and assign (parts of) as required or optional reading to law students, including these: a handbook that is the positive psychology analogue of the current and fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V),

Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Christopher Peterson & Martin E.P. Seligman eds., 2012).

An entertaining video introduction to research about happiness and positive psychology is a documentary Happy,

Happy (Wadi Rum Productions 2011).

A straightforward and pragmatic definition of mindfulness is as “the ability to know what’s happening in your head at any given moment without getting carried away by it.”

Happify, Why Mindfulness Is a Superpower: An Animation, Dec. 7, 2015 (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T02g5hnT4)

A number of law professors, bar associations, and law schools offer law students courses and programs about mindfulness. Northwestern University law school Harris H. Agnew Visiting Professor of Dispute Resolution Leonard L. Riskin

Leonard L. Riskin, Faculty Page, Northwestern Law School, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/LeonardRiskin/

University of New Mexico law professor Nathalie Martin co-authored a book about yoga for lawyers,

See e.g., Hallie Neuman Love & Nathalie Martin, Yoga for Lawyers: Mind-Body Techniques to Feel Better All the Time (2015). See also Nathalie Martin, The Lawyer in the Lotus, in The Best Lawyer You Can Be: A Guide to Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Wellness 69 (Stewart Levine ed., 2018).

Southwestern law professor Rebecca Ann Simon,

Rebecca Ann Simon Faculty Page, Southwestern Law School, http://www.swlaw.edu/faculty/full-time/rebecca-simon

Law professors can also learn from and assign several brief articles from the Harvard Business Review about mindfulness, including a discussion of business implications of neuroscience research about mindfulness,

Christina Congleton et al., Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain, Harv. Bus. Rev., Jan. 8, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/01/mindfulness-can-literally-change-your-brain

Law professors can learn from and assign (parts of) as required or optional reading to law students many books about mindfulness, including these: a trade book by an Ohio Congressman about how mindfulness can help reinvigorate the American Dream;

Tim Ryan, A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit (2013).

Many teachers have introduced mindfulness in their classes to improve the attention and emotional regulation of their students.

Lauren Cassani Davis, When Mindfulness Meets the Classroom, the Atlantic, Aug. 31, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/08/mindfulness-education-schools-meditation/402469/,

A white paper by a senior faculty member of the center for creative leadership explains how practicing mindfulness helps develop enduring resilience by eliminating stress and its root cause, namely rumination.

Nick Petrie, Wake Up! The Surprising Truth about What Drives Stress and How Leaders Build Resilience, Aug. 2013, http://www.nicholaspetrie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Wake-Up-The-Surprising-Truth-About-What-Drives-Stress-and-How-Leaders-Build-Resilience.pdfSee also generally Derek Roger & Nick Petrie, Work without Stress: Building a Resilient Mindset for Lasting Success (2016).

Law professor Debra Austin proposes the new field of positive legal education, that draws on the fields of positive psychology, neuroscience, and positive education.

Debra S. Austin, Positive Legal Education: Flourishing Law Students and Thriving Law Schools, 77 Md. L. Rev. 649 (2018).

Stanford law professor and clinical psychologist Joe Bankman posted an unpublished paper,

Joseph Bankman, Pyschoeducation about Anxiety – for You and Your Students, https://www.colorado.edu/law/sites/default/files/Bankman%20-%20Materials%20for%20Anxiety%20Psychoeducation%20Course.pdf

Bankman also posted a one-page handout providing examples of unhelpful thinking styles or cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, labelling, personalization, and overgeneralizing.

Unhelpful Thinking Styles, http://www.icctc.org/August2013/PMM%20Handouts/Unhelpful_Thinking_Styles.pdf

Curious readers may wonder if mindfulness or CBT is more effective in managing anxiety, chromic stress, and depression. Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum, a neuropsychologist and psychotherapist, cogently discusses how neuroscience and psychology research about the efficacy of practicing mindfulness compared to alternatives (such as cognitive behavioral therapy, medication, and relaxation) distracts us and misses far more crucial issues (such as motivation to practice mindfulness, socioeconomic status, and the relationship between a mindfulness student and a mindfulness teacher).

Robert Rosenbaum, Mindfulness Myths: Fantasies and Facts, in What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (and What Isn’t): Zen Perspectives 53, 63-68 (Barry Magid & Robert Rosenbaum eds., 2016).

The website, Lawyers with Depression, helps law students, lawyers, and judges cope with and heal from depression.

Lawyers with Depression, http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/

I have taught law students about happiness and mindfulness in these courses (in alphabetical order): economic analysis of law; financial decision-making; law and human behavior; law, happiness, and neuroscience; law, happiness, and subjective well-being; legal ethics and professionalism: business law issues; media, law, and popular culture; neuroscience and law, and torts. In many of these courses, I have assigned as required readings: an eight-page article about whether lawyers can learn to be happy, written by Ted David, who is a tax law professor, tax practitioner, former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent, and IRS District Counsel attorney;

Ted David, Can Lawyers Learn to be Happy? The Practical Lawyer, Aug. 2011, at 29.

I have learned many lessons from teaching law students about happiness and mindfulness, including these. First, it is important to explain that while one component of happiness is positive affect or emotion in the sense of feeling yippy-skippy, there are many other dimensions of happiness including the more cognitive notions of life satisfaction, meaning, and purpose. Second, regardless of the conception of happiness or subjective well-being being utilized, different people and societies may disagree over whether and how to trade of happiness with other desired goals. Third, empirical findings about the causes, correlates, and consequences of happiness and unhappiness usually arise from large cross-sectional studies, meaning that your mileage may vary. Fourth, correlation is not causation. Fifth, longitudinal studies are rarer than cross-sectional studies because of the much higher costs in time and money involved to conduct multi-year studies. Sixth, mindfulness is a concept with which students are familiar with in the sense that they have to have been mindful to have gotten to where they are now. Seventh, the concept of mindfulness is not binary, zero or one; mindfulness has degrees along a continuum or spectrum. Eighth, students find it hard to believe that psychological and neuroscience research demonstrates that multi-tasking is an illusion and is really serial single-tasking with high switching costs. Ninth, there are people who believe the benefits that unhappiness and mindlessness always outweigh their costs. Tenth, being mindlessly mindful is still a form of mindlessness. Eleventh, people who learn about and study happiness and mindfulness can still be at times unhappy and mindless. Twelfth, happiness and mindfulness are skills that can be taught, learned, and improved through continual and regular practice. Thirteenth, happiness and mindfulness are habits and mindsets that can be acquired and maintained. Fourteenth, annoyances and frustrations offer opportunities to practice happiness and mindfulness. Finally, it is important for law students, law professors, and lawyers to experience mindfulness directly, first-hand, and for themselves, preferably in-class, as soon as possible in discussing mindfulness through such three-minute guided meditations as these: the Body Scan Meditation

UCLA Health Website, UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, Body Scan Meditation, http://marc.ucla.edu/mpeg/Body-Scan-Meditation.mp3

I candidly and openly share with law students about how practicing mindfulness has helped me overcome professional and personal fears, setbacks, and struggles. I disclose to law students how I and many people I know experienced anxiety, depression, and chronic stress in law school and law practice. I make these disclosures to reassure law students that having feelings of anxiousness, sadness, and being overwhelmed are okay. I remind them how as law students and lawyers, we can be overly critical of ourselves and engage in unhelpful rumination. I tell them that a blind date once told me that I think too much. I asked her how much should I think and agreed that overthinking is an occupational hazard about which I have to be mindful.