May issue of THE MINDFUL LAWYER now available

If you want to learn about mindfulness in the law and related resources, click to read the newest edition of The Mindful Lawyer, "a newsletter devoted to the integration of mindfulness, neuroscience, and the practice of law."

In this edition, you will see upcoming events, and read articles such as "The Law of Mindfulness" and "The Neuroscience of Defaults and Default Judgments." From the latter article:

In the law, a "default" occurs when a party against whom a complaint has been served fails to file a response within the prescribed time.  In today's economy, more defaults are taking place as parties either do not have the money to defend an action or lack a sufficient interest in the property at issue to fight for it.  As a result, attorneys are more likely to obtain a default paving the way for an uneventful resolution. In the adversarial world of the law, the whole thing can be sort of boring.

Whereas defaults are obtained in the circuit court system, a different kind of default is obtained in the neural circuit court system (that's neural,

not neutral).  And just as in the legal system a default can be boring, it is precisely when things get boring that the default become relevant in the neural circuitry.

The Default Network

Neuroscientists have identified a network of neural activity that kicks in when your brain is "at rest," or more specifically, not attending to a particular external task or event. Examples include mental activity while driving on the highway, sitting in a waiting room, or being asked to not focus on anything in particular.  As we'll explore in this month's Mindfulness Memo, the quality of your awareness when the default network is engaged can make a profound difference in your work and life, and mindfulness practices can be very helpful in this regard.

Click to read the newsletter. As usual, congratulations to Scott Rogers for an excellent edition.