Burnout: Experiences of a Recent 1L

By Isabelle Wu

Burnout. Was the precise word to describe my state of mind after experiencing the whirlwind of endless Zoom lectures and back-to-back exams that was called 1L. The first year of my legal education, for all of its prestige and intellectual stimulation, did not leave me with a good taste in my mouth. In fact, it was positively destructive, at least to a certain extent.

When orientation began in fall 2020, my class was asked again and again to recognize how privileged we were for being able to study law online even with the pandemic still looming over our heads. And I internalized that, as I ought to have. We were privileged, and still are, there is no doubt about that. And I was particularly so. Being sorted to the small group Gee at Allard meant that I was to study under the name of the first woman of Chinese descent to be called to the bar in British Columbia. It had special significance to me. At the time, these feelings of gratitude and anticipation made polar lights dance across the confines of my bedroom walls. I thought I was ready to take on anything.

At what point did my overwhelming zest for law school begin to recede below the waterline? The year passed by in a blur, as semesters and course schedules melted into each other like how words on a PowerPoint began to swim around the screen when you stared at them for too long. I recall how I felt nearing the end of our spring reading break. “Like a lamb to the slaughter,” I joked with my friends, knowing full well that we had seven term-ends to deal with that semester.

And it wasn’t just the stress either. It was the complete lack of feedback and social isolation from my peers that made the whole experience so alienating. In the middle of the fall semester, we had a Zoom call with some 3Ls. They looked so snug on the couch I felt like I was watching a science fiction movie. Their limbs were IKEA plush dolls, whilst ours were rusted gadgets in dire need of some WD-40 lubrication. It wasn’t until they said that no one flunks out of law school. Literally. That I realized that I could breathe. That I was allowed to breathe. I had no idea.

Who could I have turned to for those things? I was the first one studying law in the family. My peers were little more than tiny Zoom icons and anonymous animals on the Google drive document. The professors themselves were caught in a whirlwind of trying to figure out online instruction. It broke my heart a little to hear a favourite professor say that he spent hours prepping a video for us to watch before realizing it had failed to record. At the end of the day, no one could reallyguarantee that we were bound to pass 1L, even if we tried our very best. Besides, even if we weren’t studying under the influence of the pandemic, my cohorts and I would have felt equally estranged by the law school system. I fear that some of the biggest problems with the curriculum and our current approach to legal education would still be there.

It was, in short, the perfect still image of the existential status of human life — we were thrown right into it, and had no way out.

Diagnosis: why does law school drain my spirit?

Now that I am in my final year of law school, I finally have a chance to take a step back from the whole ordeal, and think about what exactly went down that year. What was it about 1L in particular that affected me so much to the point where I deem it to be destructive? And perhaps more unsettling — am I even the same person as I was prior to the law school experience?

The World Health Organization defines burnout as a psychological syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It is characterized by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from one’s job, feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.

Now, I can clearly see why 1Ls suffer from chronic workplace stress with all of law school’s time constraints and exceptionally high stakes (or at least we are led to believe them to be). After all, what else describes this predicament better than the pang of pain I felt when my friend told me that she has finally mustered up the courage to take a half day off from studying, only because it was her birthday?

This is precisely why I don’t think I could ever say that my cohort and I could have done a better job of managing the stress. To say so would be so devastatingly invalidating. We were all pushing well past our limits, searching in the dark for that light switch that probably doesn’t even exist. But even with exhaustion seeped into the marrow our bones, few of us demonstrated any degree of “reduced professional efficacy”.

Is this what the law school experience is all about? To break us down and to build us up once again? Because I don’t feel like the me that has been reconstructed is the same person as I was prior to my legal education. Is that okay? Is that to be expected? And perhaps more imminently at stake — will I be okay?

Of course, none of us is identical to the person we were two, three years ago. But law school annihilates your previous sense of self in an unparalleled manner. It reconstructs your value system, throws you head first into a frantic lifestyle, and perhaps most dreadfully — can even take away your desire to learn.

Where did my curiosity go?

Our desire to learn is driven by curiosity. Curiosity and wonder combines a desire to know with an awareness of our own ignorance. It is a state that makes us open to new experiences, and is critical to lifelong personal development and achieving happiness.

According to the philosopher and educator Martha Nussbaum, our innate capacity for wonder is best developed through an arts-based education, especially through play. In what she calls the potential space of play, there is no singular definition of progress or achievement. Mistake and failure are simply not punished in play space.

This kind of education allows students to feel more confident in exploring new areas of knowledge, and helps generate creativity and innovation. When the threat of failure is neutralized through play, students are better able to deal with feelings of vulnerability because it make us more accepting of ourselves, as well as the ups and downs of our learning curves. As such, legal classrooms employing pedagogies of play enhances students’ intrinsic motivation for learning, and can be conducive to the development of empathy which is so crucial to ethical professional and personal lives.

Can we play?

Unfortunately, it is precisely the element of play that is absent in law school. After all, who would compare their 1L experience to “play space”? In reality, it’s more like the famous AC/DC song Highway to Hell.

The lack of play in legal education is manifold and all-encompassing. 100% finals were compounded by the fact that those were the grades to determine which of us were able to land a position through OCIs (on campus interviews) — advertised as the epitome of law student success. Group projects were rare, if not obsolete. Whilst class discussions were washed away of play potential carried out in virtual break-out rooms centred around a set of highly scripted answers. Fast-paced lectures annihilated any possibility for meaningful reflection, and the tight grade curve entailed that there was simply no win-win situation for all the students.

The problem with the case study method employed in contemporary North American law schools is that it is singular in approach. It is in essence a technical and factual approach to education that over-glorifies the ability to think logically by asking students to see arguments written by judges as facts-in-themselves. Students are asked to learn cases by rote, and to regurgitate settled cases without room for originality. No wonder Nussbaum claimed that this kind of technical learning literally “deadened the personality”. Students feel alienated from their own experiences, and become weary of exposing any vulnerability. This is so counterproductive to building health relationships, with others but also with oneself. No wonder we are the generation of burnouts

The path forward

The problem with a vocationally-oriented technical education that does away with the humanities aspect of life is that it fails to account for the creative agency in individual students. With the increasing diversification of contemporary law schools, there is endless potential in the legal perspectives and personal experiences each students brings to the table. And if law schools are truly to serve the needs of the legal community we live as a part of, then legal education ought to reflect the myriad of legal perspectives lived by its agents. And the best place to start? Right here in the classroom.

Through incorporating play into the curriculum, an arts-based education can combat passive, apathetic learning by making the learning experience fun and rewarding. To allow students to enjoy their education, which takes up such a substantial portion of their lives, is a tremendous accomplishment in itself! One method of doing this has been envisioned by the legal thinker James Boyd White, who invites his students to participate in the activity of the law by drawing on personal experiences in their engagement with questions about the law.² As students come to appreciate their unique situatedness, they may participate in the law in a richer, more emotive way, with all of their imagination, feelings, and personal desires. The role of legal education, then, would be to offer epistemological validation of each students’ personalized set of legal knowledge, and to prompt students to discover their own voices within and outside of the law.

Ultimately, an arts-based education’s contribution towards personal emotional development is consistent with education’s goal of promoting self-realization. As students engage with law as a humanities, they are invited to reflect carefully and critically about what makes their lives meaningful and what kind of society do they wish to constitute. This is done by participating in the activity of law as an intellectual activity that demands for your whole attention and sense of self. Students are invited to participate in the law as an activity much like how an artist is invited to paint a work of art. By exploring the manifold possibilities of law, language, and the world in a way that is hugely emotionally and deeply personal, law as an activity demanded for, but also released, authenticity. As such, it is education’s task to give students the literary and social skills to actively participate in such discourses, as well as to have what they have to say listened to.

Going forward, incorporating the arts into our legal educational system can effectively prevent burnout, and lead to more ethical lawyering and responsible citizenship. Poetry and music can be advanced forms of play for adults, thereby allowing us to redefine ourselves not as means for productivity or the “hired gun”, but autonomous agents with capacities for love, self-realization, and social change. It is an avenue towards self-realization and lifetime happiness as students are invited to participate in discourses surrounding what kind of meaning can they ascribe to their professional lives, and what value does the legal profession play in society at large.

Nussbaum, Martha C. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
White, J. B. (1985). The Legal Imagination: Abridged Edition. The University of Chicago Press.