The Mindful Society:
The Law of Mindfulness
Traditional legal training focuses on overcoming
external challenges. Now, an increasing number of lawyers are training
themselves to work on their inner life in an effort to improve their law practice,
benefit clients and colleagues, provide better training for other lawyers, and,
ultimately, yield better justice.
The leading initiative in this area is the Law Program of
the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, headquartered in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The program sponsors annual retreats and other gatherings for lawyers, judges,
professors, and students. It held its first retreat in 1998, for Yale Law
School students and faculty, led by mindfulness luminary Joseph Goldstein. The
program has held over twenty retreats and events since, including its flagship
annual retreat for legal professionals at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in
Marin County. In 2008-2009, the program held retreats on both the East and West
Coasts. The retreats combine sitting and walking meditation, yoga, qigong,
speakers, and discussion.
The Law Program’s leading light is Charlie Halpern, a
renowned public interest lawyer who is chair of the board of the Center for
Contemplative Mind in Society. In 1982 when he became the founding dean of the
City University of New York’s law school, he started practicing meditation to
work with the resulting stress. Since 2002, he’s been leading a weekly
meditation group at Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California
at Berkeley, together with Doug Chermak, the law program’s director.
Chermak, an environmental lawyer in Oakland, told me that
the crux of the Law Program is “effective and sustainable lawyering” and “the
meditative perspective,” the view that a practitioner of a contemplative
discipline brings to their professional and personal life. He says the central
question is, “How does meditation affect the quality of your listening, your
ethics, and any kind of interaction you would have as a legal professional?”
One of the main aims is to help lawyers learn to cultivate insight in the midst
of the challenges they face.
“Legal training,” Chermak says, “teaches you to think like
a lawyer, but there’s no focus on dealing with the intense emotions involved in
this work.” Lawyers who come to retreats are looking for ways to integrate the
work they’re doing with the other parts of their life, so their work “is not
cut off from who they are as a core human being.” Lawyers often deal with nasty
people and hot disputes and they are taught to meet fire with fire, but that
struggle often brings deep pain and burnout. In using contemplative techniques,
Chermak says, lawyers may discover a way to be “fierce, even warrior-like if
need be, but in a way that is also wise and kind.”
The Law Program’s annual retreat is on hiatus this year.
Instead, the focus is on a major conference, "Meditation in Law: Sharing
Current Practices and Mapping Future Horizons," cosponsored by the Baldy
Center of the University at Buffalo law school, where it will be held in early October. The conference,
Chermak says, “brings together lawyers, law professors, judges, mediators,
dispute resolution practitioners, and law students, whatever their level of
familiarity with mindfulness. We’ll seek to create opportunities for cutting-edge
research on meditation in the legal profession and start a leadership group to
promote the continuing presence of meditation in the law.” It will be
the first major gathering of its kind since Harvard Law School offered a
symposium on Mindfulness and Alternative Dispute Resolution in 2002.
Robert Chender has been practicing meditation as long as
he has been practicing law, more than thirty years. Recently he has been trying
to bring together these two important parts of his life. In September 2008, he
decided to attend a retreat sponsored by the Law Program at Menla Mountain
Retreat Center in Phoenicia, New York. After that, Chender says, he felt even
more sure that “it would be useful to create a way for New York lawyers to gather
and discuss the application of mindfulness practices to the practice of law.”
He had already approached the New York City Bar (with more than 23,000 members)
about doing something, and after some back and forth, it gave him “a one-shot
opportunity to do a presentation” not long after he returned from Menla.
Sixty-five people showed up.
After such a successful turnout, the bar approached
Chender about holding a series of ongoing presentations on the topic. The group
meets monthly, with attendance ranging from fifteen to forty-five. “There are
quite a few meditators in the profession, so I’ve been able to stop doing all
the presentations myself and invite guest speakers,” Chender says. Following
twenty minutes of meditation, there’s a presentation about how meditation
practice might affect a law practice. Afterwards, the participants gather in a
large oval to discuss what’s on their minds.
In November, Chender presented the first-ever daylong
program on integrating mindfulness practice with law practice at the City
University of New York law school. The thirty-five participants received
continuing legal education credits (CLE) for the program, which included about
three hours of meditation practice. Chender is also a presenter at an annual
continuing legal education program cosponsored by the Vermont Bar and Tail of
the Tiger at Karme-Chöling meditation center in Barnet, Vermont. In January, he
began a blog called Contemplative Law (http://contemplativelaw.wordpress.com/).
“Mindfulness,” Chender says, “could help them accomplish what they need to in
ways that are better, and less unhealthy for their mind and body, than they
were doing before.”
While in law school at the University of Florida in the
early nineties, Scott Rogers, author of Mindful
Parenting, learned transcendental meditation from a counselor who helped
students work with the stress of a legal education. Shortly after law school,
Rogers began to practice mindfulness meditation with the Miami Beach Sangha, a
group of students inspired by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. He also became
interested in neuroscience and secular mindfulness. In early 2005, he attended
a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program with Jon Kabat-Zinn. While there,
Rogers met Dan Siegel, author of The
Mindful Brain. Siegel’s work, together with Rogers’ own mindfulness
practice and teaching experience, inspired Rogers to start a mindfulness
program for lawyers.
Rogers’ program, Jurisight, uses legal language and
thinking to express mindfulness principles. For example, Rogers says, “The
attractive nuisance doctrine refers to perils that are also attractive, such as
a swimming pool that’s easily accessible by children. They’re enticed to jump
in, but unsupervised they could drown. In Jurisight, I talk about how jealousy
and anger are somehow attractive places to go, but they are also nuisances. How
can we catch our mind as we begin to move toward these attractive nuisances?”
In Rogers’ daylong programs, which earn lawyers CLEs, he uses these as
discussion catalysts that become reminders. “If we can connect a subtle
principle of mindfulness to a term that already resonates in the lawyer’s
brain, it becomes more accessible, more likely to be called upon, and more likely
to become a reminder to practice during times of challenge.”
In June, Rogers presented a program at the Florida Bar
Convention called “Mindfulness, Neuroscience, and the Law,” which focused on
improving effectiveness and reducing stress through understanding how the brain
works under certain conditions. He was also invited to offer a noncredit,
eight-week, two-hour-per-week Jurisight class for first-year law students as
part of a wellness initiative at the University of Miami law school. Fifty
students, or about 10 percent of the class, completed the program this year.
From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.
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