Day 257: Positive Psychology School of Law
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
If I were going to be a law school dean, I’d only want to be dean of Positive Psychology School of Law.
At Positive Psych Law, we would design the entire law school experience around the tenets of positive psychology research. For example:
Traditional grades and rankings would be OUT. Students would receive periodic qualitative feedback across several specific learning outcomes (rule identification, oral advocacy, client counseling, etc.). An evaluation of “needs improvement” in any area would channel the student to additional work in that area.
Each faculty and staff member would be trained to smile and make eye contact with everyone they meet during the work day. Everyone, regardless of their job, would meet annually to decide what each of them will do to make a daily positive impact on students and the law school community as a whole.
Law school would be organized around the goal of service. The first year would involve core doctrinal classes plus shadowing and volunteering. The second year would be devoted to simulations and practica in a few fields of the student’s choice. The entire third year would be devoted to clinical, externship, or other approved legal service work under attorney supervision in the specialty of the student’s choice.
Law school would involve less individual work and more group projects — for example, a service team, under the supervision of knowledgeable faculty and staff, might design a project to “increase the delivery of competent will drafting and estate planning services to senior citizens in our state.”
The graduation speaker(s) would be the student team that had made the biggest impact through service, as voted by their peers.
Here’s the catch — but this one would be the biggest overall contributor to happiness: Students, faculty, and staff would be required — I’ll say it again, required — to leave personal cell phones at home and to disable social media on their laptops outside of a designated “social media work area” of the library. Students could use flip phones or pagers for important calls, or have messages left for them with the receptionist. (Kids: This is how we used to do it back in the stone ages — it worked!)
Positive Psychology School of Law probably could not seek ABA accreditation, because the current ABA rules force law schools into narrow confines. And it would have to inure itself to the cries of law firm partners who claim they can’t possibly make hiring decisions unless students have been assigned grades like USDA beef.
I’m guessing I’ll never have to make the hard decision to leave immigration clinical teaching and scholarship to lead Positive Psych School of Law. But it doesn’t hurt to imagine what if ….