Susan Daicoff

Based on these findings, law schools can no longer ignore their moral obligation to produce healthy and satisfied lawyers. It is self-evident that they should begin educating law students on the topic of professional satisfaction by elucidating the importance of making career decisions based on their professional values. By helping them identify their professional values and make individual career decisions that correspond to those values, law schools can help lawyers and law students derive satisfaction from their professional lives.

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Editor's Note: David Wexler is Professor of Law and Director, International Network on Therapeutic Jurisprudence,University of Puerto Rico and a Distinguished Research Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology, University of Arizona. With Bruce Winick, he is the co-founder of the movement of therapeutic jurisprudence. Since we haven't caught up with David to interview him, he has graciously allowed us to reprint a recent law review article. .

It begins below but is attached in PDF form in its entirety so that formatting such as footnotes will be preserved.

Introduction

At the University of Puerto Rico School of Law (UPR) in the fall term of the 2008-2009 academic year, I offered, for the first time, a sentencing and corrections seminar—approached, of course, with a distinctly therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) spin. During that term, I was also asked to review a manuscript prepared by Florida Coastal School of Law student Dax Miller. Dax Miller’s paper, prepared for Professor Susan Daicoff’s Comprehensive Law course and published in The Florida Coastal Law Review,[1] did not relate to sentencing and corrections. Rather, it critiqued, from a TJ perspective, the standard Florida divorce agreement form.[2] Moreover, Dax Miller proposed a rewritten form, one highly consistent with TJ principles.[3] At just the time that I read Dax Miller’s paper I came across, in my assigned sentencing casebook, the federal pretrial diversion form,4 and concluded that it too was in desperate need of Daxing. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Dax Miller had opened up a completely new potential branch of TJ scholarship—what might be called Form Reform.

“What would your mother say?”

A Mediator/Educator’s Perspective

Which values and skill sets will best serve us as mediators and perhaps more generally as lawyers? Where do we learn them?