Perceptions of Stress and Control in the First Semester of Law School

Legal education has been the focus of much criticism. It has been charged with warping personalities, undermining ethical and social values, and fostering cynicism in students. It has been seen as the source of psychological patterns inimical to later ethical practice. Perhaps its most noted criticism is its apparent propensity for inducing psychological distress in law students. One commentator notes: In a world in which legal work is becoming increasingly diversified and specialized, lawyers have one common bond: law school. Despite curricular experimentation, the law school experience is stubbornly uniform for students at law schools across the country. Regardless of their year of study or the diversity of their class schedules or teachers\u27 styles, law students will still face a process that has a similar effect upon them. Law school is stressful. The negative effects of law school on the well-being of students are becoming well known and have been shown in a number of different studies. One way to empirically evaluate the relative impact of stressors is to assess their ability to cause helplessness, a condition associated with the experience of uncontrollable stress. Despite its importance in determining the impact of stressors, perceived control has not been assessed as it applies to the stressors experienced by law students. Helplessness is characterized by deficits in motivation mood disturbance, interpersonal insensitivity, and negative physical outcomes such as immunosuppression, all of which are experienced by law students. To study the possible sources of helplessness in law school, fifty-two first-year law students in their eighth and ninth weeks of law school rated sixteen different law school stressors on their perceived stressfulness and controllability

Fostering Diversity in the Legal Profession: A Model for Preparing Minority and Other Non-Traditional Students for Law School

In recent years, law schools have struggled to recruit and graduate a more diverse student population, recognizing that greater diversity benefits both the law school community and society at large. Students from non-traditional backgrounds enrich the law school environment by bringing new perspectives into the law school dialogue. They enrich the profession and society by providing lawyers, role models, and leaders to disenfranchised communities and by helping the bench and bar better reflect the populations they serve

Preparing Minority Students for Law School: The Program for Minority Access to Law School

Students of color traditionally have been under-represented in law school admissions, and those admitted have higher attrition rates than their white counterparts. In response to these concerns, law schools have instituted a number of programs in recent years designed to increase minority enrollments and retention rates. Most of these programs target minority students immediately before or during their time in law school. Receiving less attention have been programs designed to provide instruction and motivation to minority undergraduates interested in law early in their college careers. In 1991, the law schools at Northern Illinois University, the University of Illinois, and Southern Illinois University co-sponsored a pilot instructional program for minority undergraduate students. Entitled the Program for Minority Access to Law School (PMALS), the project involved six weeks of on-campus instruction at Northern Illinois University from June 17 to July 26, 1991. The primary goals of the program were to stimulate interest in the legal profession and to enhance the analytical and writing skills necessary to success in law school, thereby increasing the pool of qualified minority law applicants. This article will describe the purpose, structure, and evaluation of the pilot PMALS program. Part I will discuss the background and goals of the program. Part II will discuss the program\u27s structure, including student recruitment and curricular design. Part III will discuss the evaluation of the program. Finally, the conclusion will discuss the role that programs such as PMALS might play in the minority recruitment and retention process

Preparing Undergraduate Minority Students For the Law School Experience

The purpose of this article is to describe the philosophy and purposes of the Pre-Legal Studies program; to detail the operation of the program; to devleop some preliminary evaluations of the success of the program in achieving its objectives; and to make rcommendations for improvement

Black Enrollment in Law Schools: Forward to the Past?

For a hundred years after the first Black student entered an American law school in 1868, Blacks were barely visible in law schools. Starting in the late 1960s, they made modest gains in enrollment. Black representation in law school peaked within a decade, and leveled off by the mid-1970s. This enrollment plateau continued until the mid-1980s, when signs appeared that Blacks might again become a rarity in law schools. This article focuses on the barriers to Blacks\u27 entry into law school from the nineteenth century, when law schools came into prominence, until the present. An examination of the structural and racial forces explains why so few Blacks entered, and a disproportionately few continue to enter law school. The article proceeds chronologically, considering enrollment patterns and explanations for them in three periods: 1) the century following the enrollment of the first Black law student in 1868; 2) the decade of substantial growth in Black enrollment; and 3) the leveling off in Black enrollment during the late 1970s and 1980s

National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS)

The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) examines the characteristics of students in postsecondary education, with special focus on how they finance their education. It features: Nationally representative cross-sectional study of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in postsecondary educationFirst conducted in 1987; most recent data from 2015-16Examines the characteristics of students in postsecondary education, with a special focus on how they finance their educationConnects multiple data sources including student interviews, institution records, government databases, and other administrative sourcesState-representative data for most states available from NPSAS:18-AC (expected 2020