Well-Being in the Legal Profession: Altruism, Justice, and Legal Reform

This book provides a critical psychosocial analysis of legal practice, documenting a mental health crisis among lawyers and judges and linking this crisis to a dysfunctional legal system they continue to control.

Tracing studies of lawyers and judges over 40 years, this book demonstrates that decades of mental distress and social detachment in the legal profession have seriously damaged the legal system. Focusing largely on conditions in the United States, but also drawing on studies from the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, the book depicts how this system is jeopardized by lawyers’ egocentrism, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. To improve the legal system and lawyers’ mental health – integrating law, psychology, sociology, and policy making – the book advocates a renewed commitment to justice, compassion, respect and fairness through an ethic of regenerative altruism.

This book will appeal to legal academics concerned with the sociology of legal practice, as well as those involved in training lawyers; it will also be of interest to practicing lawyers, judges and others engaged by issues of social justice and legal reform.