What does it mean to think like a lawyer? And what does thinking like a lawyer do to your brain? How does law school and the practice of law change you physiologically, altering that organ you carry around in your head? How is a lawyer's brain different from the brain of a person who has not experienced legal training and practice? And how does that difference affect your relationships with those people in your professional and personal life with brains different from a lawyer's?
While there are many processes that occur in the brain when practicing law, the use of language is one that strongly affects and molds the lawyer's brain. James Boyd White in his thought-provoking book The Legal Imagination looks at the relationship between the lawyer's language and the lawyer's mind.
Once it is recognized that lawyers do see things differently from other people, that their minds work differently - that they themselves are different - it becomes important to ask what it means to become a lawyer oneself. Is being a lawyer something you can put on and take off like a suit of clothes, or does it somehow change you beyond repair?
As a part of looking at that relationship, he discusses what is said about an event and what is not.
The description of an event can go on forever and still be incomplete. ... The new lawyer sees this as soon as he finds he must tell a real story and discovers that it can never be done, that there is always more to say ... .
White says that law school teaches a person what to cut out of a story:
the line that separates the expressed from the unexpressed, what can be said from what cannot.
Discussing the lawyer's distinct use and experience of language, White asks if the "peculiarities we observe" are due to the
existence of a discrete professional language with its own vocabulary and syntax
or to
habits of mind and ways of working that find expression in whatever verbal language the lawyer uses, even when he is talking, say, to his client or to a jury in ordinary English.
White then asks:
What relationship can the lawyer establish with these patterns of thought and language that he uses? Can he simply learn to use and master them without being somehow affected – perhaps controlled – by what he has learned? . . . What is the relationship between the lawyer's language and his mind?
Yes, the lawyer is affected. Given what we know about the brain today, the choices a lawyer makes about what is said and left unsaid, the language and syntax a lawyer uses, and the lawyer's "habits of mind" all change the lawyer's brain. Thinking like a lawyer physically changes your brain.
Neuroplasticity shows that all people's brains are changing all the time. If we change what we think about or how we think, new paths develop in our brain. If we get injured, new paths can develop to accommodate for the injury. When we have new experiences or learn something, our brains change. The brain changes minute to minute, experience to experience, thought to thought. It was not so long ago that we thought that brains were hard-wired by the time a person left adolescence. The brain experts now tell us that is not so.
Neural Darwinism shows that the synapses we use are strengthened and those that we do not use atrophy and are lost.
What synapses are created and what are lost in law school? What synapses are created and lost in the practice of law? Are you losing any that you would prefer to keep? Use them or lose them.
If you are talking to someone who has a different brain, a brain that does not have the lawyer synapses, how do you foster effective communication? One sure method: see the person, ask questions, and fully listen. Simple but not always easy. Watching, inquiring, and hearing will promote a mind meld rather than a relationship meltdown.
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Excerpts from the idealawg interview of Carol Metzker:
According to Dr. John Kounios, our brains aren't hard-wired like computers are. He points to evidence that our neural connections change after a 20-minute conversation. Taking a page from the book of Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, the more we use a mental process, the stronger it gets. The less we use one, the weaker it gets, until it is eventually "pruned."
. . .
Gerald Edelman, the Nobel laureate, described "neural Darwinism", the process of pruning off the mental processes we don't use and strengthening those we use often.
Note (added July 22, 2007, 10:18 AM Mountain): For more on learning to think like a lawyer, you may read "Law Students: Create A Well-rounded Life."
Note (added September 27, 2007, 6:03 PM Mountain): At Law Librarian Blog: Professional Reading: Thinking Like a Lawyer: The Heuristics of Case Synthesis.
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