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In this penetrating book, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado use
historical investigation and critical analysis to diagnose the
cause of the pervasive unhappiness among practicing lawyers. Most
previous writers have blamed the high rate of burnout, depression,
divorce, and drug and alcohol dependency among these highly paid
professionals on the narrow specialization, long hours, and intense
pressures of modern legal practice. Stefancic and Delgado argue
that these professional demands are only symptoms of a deeper
problem: the way lawyers are taught to think and reason. They show
how legal education and practice have been rendered arid and dull
by formalism, a way of thinking that values precedent and doctrine
above all, exalting consistency over ambiguity, rationality over
emotion, and rules over social context and narrative.Stefancic and
Delgado dramatize the plight of modern lawyers by exploring the
unlikely friendship between Archibald MacLeish, who gave up a
successful but unsatisfying law career to pursue his literary
yearnings, and Ezra Pound. Reading the forty-year correspondence
between MacLeish and Pound, Stefancic and Delgado draw lessons
about the difficulties of attorneys trapped in worlds that give
them power, prestige, and affluence but not personal satisfaction,
much less creative fulfillment. Long after Pound had embraced
fascism, descended into lunacy, and been institutionalized,
MacLeish took up his old mentor's cause, turning his own lack of
fulfillment with the law into a meaningful crusade and ultimately
securing Pound's release from St. Elizabeths Hospital. Drawing on
MacLeish's story, Stefancic and Delgado contend that literature,
public interest work, and critical legal theory offer tools to
contemporary attorneys for finding meaning and overcoming
professional dissatisfaction.
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